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Classic HN: ITAPPMONROBOT

At the turn of the 21st century, Initrode Global's server infrastructure began showing cracks. Anyone that had been in the server room could immediately tell that its growth had been organic. Rackmounted servers sat next to recommissioned workstations, with cables barely secured by cable ties. Clearly there had been some effort to clean things up a bit, but whoever put forth that effort gave up halfway through. It wasn't pretty, but it worked for years. As time passed, though, a proprietary gateway server to communicate with credit processing agencies would crash more and more frequently. And these were bad crashes, too — the kind of crashes where the server wouldn't respond to ping and would have to be restarted manually. It wasn't really a big deal for the admin, Erik, to hit the restart button on the server when he was there, but that was only 40 hours a week. The credit union needed it to be active 24/7, but was unwilling to hire 24 hour staff in the datacenter. The problem kept getting worse and worse, so the IT manager called up a meeting.

As time passed, though, a proprietary gateway server to communicate with credit processing agencies would crash more and more frequently. I mean, I'd have to position the servers just right, somehow get the heights and alignment correct, and update the polling script to eject the CD ROM drive any time it didn't respond to ping." It spent the last weeks of its life dutifully opening and closing its CD ROM drive every two minutes, reaching in vain for the restart button that it'd never touch again.

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