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When IT and Bad Government Meet, Everyone Loses
Cron-os writes "The city of Wilkes Barre, Pa is furiously trying to enter some 25,000 tax records into their new PC network. Their aging AS/400 crashed sometime around April 15, and the city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network. You can read the associated articles here, here, and here. I'm so glad I live across the river in a SANE city." I wonder if these bozos run their schools and roads departments with the same level of professionalism.
You fucking asshole. Wilkes-Barre is a dying town that is desperately trying to recover from their coal mining days. Oh, yeah, my grandparents and parents are from their, go figure- I was lucky enough that my parents escaped before the place crashed. Now the place is living off the backs of thousands of Social Security receiving old folks, and the geography is in the middle of nowhere, PA. This isn't Silicon Valley.
Let me know where you're parents came from so I can make some slurs about them.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Not that it will matter, but this is not your ordinary suburb or anything. This is a very old town in the middle of PA that was based on coal mining in the early 1900's. They lost thousands in WW2, the coal business crashed in the 50's, and they never recovered. All of the kids (starting with my parent's generation in the late 60's- yes they are from there) have left, leaving very few youngsters, besides Wilkes College. This is not a place where IT folks flock to, and any that are there most likely get paid at least 1/2 of any of you do. The people there are good people, but they couldn't tell a Mac from an IBM mainframe.
So don't go and call them bozos. Call the idiots who work in the IT divisions bozos if you must, but the average person in Wilkes-Barre wouldn't know what the hell the article right-up means, besides the word taxes.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
...blame the city administrator. Working for a municipality myself, I suspected this was probably the case before I read the supporting articles...they just confirmed my suspicion. Basically, what you've got here is a situation where you've got a city administrator that doesn't know diddly squat about computers. I don't know anything about the guy, but I would guess that he's probably in his 50's and may have an accounting background (if he has any credentials at all). Like a lot of people in that type of position, he was being short-sighted and cheap. He got busted for it; lots of others don't. Their computer guy may have (and probably did) protested the city administrator's decision to let the maintenance contract lapse, but obviously, the final decision wasn't in his hands. If anyone should lose their job over this, it's the city administrator.
AS/400s have built in RAID-5 hardware. they also have redundant PSUs, built in UPS, the whole nine yards. they store data in EBCDIC not ASCII but its trivial to dump data from the built in DB/2 database into a PC since IBM AS/400s typically come with a PC expansion card that boots a virtual PC with windows which can see the filesystem. .... those things are bloody reliable and multiply redundant. more likely a crashed job or some other simple software error that makes it appear like the system "crashed" (i.e. not responding).
i have a theory that the midrange (its not a mainframe) somehow killed the process (or batch job) running that operated the front end of their data entry system...or the process died on its own. they probably dont know how to login as QSECOFR and restart the batch process to get their front end back and so they think their system crashed. i doubt its a hardware failure
I know the moron journalist said it was, but trust me, it's not. It's an AS400 Minicomputer. Mainframes are much larger and more expensive.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Quote: The employees have been typing at a rate of about 200 items per day.
/shitload/ of information on each and every person, they should be able to manage at least twice that. If they can't, they need to bring in some temps or something--people who actually have some clue how to do data entry properly.
A whole 200 items per day, huh? No wonder it's going to take so long. Unless they've having to enter a
When we were looking at an AS/400 to replace our aging System/36 in the early nineties, the models we could afford had a backup tape system and nothing else as far as redundancy goes. We decided to replace it with a PC network.
Of course, I didn't cancel support on either the 36 or the Wang until the network had been up and running for six months or so. Doing it sooner would have been, well, stupid.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Many times during a typical week, people call into my employer's tech support line, looking for support on their software. Many of our customers are in the public service industry, and they take top priority because of human lives that are at risk if their paging systems go down. Some IT directors or system administrators get our software working when they first bought it a few years ago, but neglect to renew their support contracts after 90 days. When they call back stating that they bought new computers and their software no longer works, I have to be the bearer of bad news when I need to refer them to sales to renew their support. Some say that this is bad business, but it's their fault because they are trying to get for free needed support that they should have renewed.
I actually have customers who I contact informally through back channels when something critical goes wrong, because it's a hell of a lot easier than dealing with all the policital shit.
Having a solid gold service contract is worthless, if the managers of the people running the machines hamstring them at every turn.
Geeks work well together, PHB's work(?) well together, but geeks and PHB's.... watch out.
So far in his 8 years of office(estimate) he has managed to get 2 government buildings and a telemarketing center in the downtown. Government buildings may look nice but they are basically a resource drain because they don't pay any taxes. There are some other new businesses, but they are in tax free development zones. The one government building is home to the offices of rep. Paul Kanjorksi who as actually managed to a great disservice to the community but he is a senior congressman who will never loose an election due to name recognition and voter habit. Anyway, it looks like Mcgroarty will not be reelected this year so the situation may improve but most likely not.
McGroarty actually looked promising initially because he was very enthusiastic. It turned out that he just craved attention. The problem with WB and all NEPA politics for that matter, is the fact that competent people do not want to run for office. Most of the talented younger people leave the area, and the people who are left that would make a difference are usually tied to a business or career path which prevents them from running for office. I really don't see an end to this cycle unless competent people start getting politically involved in this area.
What happened is the tax office lost power due to a flooded power vault (that they were in the process of waterproofing). I'm not sure if the article states this - I'm in a hurry, so sorry :P
I'm a CS student at Wilkes, and we're fortunate to have such a good department. The subnet is run by student admins (I'm one of them). We've been using various Linux distros for quite awhile now (long before I was here anyway). The dualboot systems run Redhat (mainly because kickstart makes upgrading 30 boxes really easy). The SLC404 lab runs Slack (on an added note, there is a sign on the door to the lab that says "404 - Food not Found" that of course, nobody obeys, but we leave it up because it's funny, well okay, maybe not *that* funny, ah hell with it...). My personal box in the server room runs OpenBSD (nice perk about being an admin is you can co-lo a box into the server room). We've got a couple Mac OS X machines floating around (with dual head displays and DVD-RAMs which we use to burn... uh... n/m ;-) ). Then there is that bastard Solaris machine (quad node sun arch) we keep around for the database class (runs both Oracle and mySQL, but everyone uses Oracle anyway...).
I'd like to quickly plug Open Source Development at Wilkes University, one of the opensource sites here at Wilkes. It started from a Networks class assignment a year ago and is still being maintained.
The Networks class assignment is definitely an interesting one. For all those concerned about newbies setting up honeypots, don't worry, I keep a tight leash on those kiddies.
The Math/CS Club has seen livelier days, but at least we have a nice webpage, a nice PGP ring of trust, and a fairly well-developed FAQ (though, none of the freshman ever read it first, they always ask the admins first, who then refer them to the faq and immediately knock their quota down 5 MB.)
We're also the only autonomous subnet at Wilkes. All the other departments have had their subnets assimilated by the technology department (who, in my opinion, are basically fucking idiots). The Math/CS faculty gives us (the student admins) pretty much free reign over how things are done. We keep everything running smoothly on the subnet and they fight off the evil administration.
Yea, the city does suck too. Though, the nice thing about living near a bunch of stripmines and old abandoned coal mining villiages is there are some great places to place paintball. My personal favorite is Concrete City, which consists of 14 concrete two story duplex-style houses (some have basements even!). It's a real rush to with such close house-to-house and room-to-room paintball.
Just my 2c. -root@mathcs.wilkes.edu
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
There's nothing inherantly wrong with how the program worked. And that IBM was willing to maintain the machine for $850 per month, that means it's not a terribly old one. (Despite the wheeze in the article claiming the AS/400 was 20 years old, that cannot be true if the machine was on a maintenance agreement last year. It's got to be at at least V4R4 for IBM to be supporting the box at all. And none of the CISC boxes can run any of the V4 levels of OS/400, which means the thing is less than 8 years old, and is probably less than 5.) Even the first generation RISC boxes are at the end of the supported life. There doesn't sound like there was any real reason to change, except someone convinced them that the $850 a month they were paying IBM as (effectively) insurance against the AS/400 failing was a waste of money. It turned out differently.
I worked with AS/400s quite a bit up until 5 years ago. They are very impressive machines, from a business point of view. You don't need anyone terribly technical to run the things (a week's operator training and your admin could do it -- that's what a lot of small companies do.) Programming on them is ridiculously productive: they're object-oriented down to the operating system level and with a built-in object relational database everything integrates seamlessly and so easily that it's trivial. Anyone who wants to hold IBM up as a marketing company should look at the AS/400: the coolest business system no one's ever heard of!
And maintenance is a breeze, if you have a contract with IBM: the system detects most hardware faults and sends out an SOS to IBM, most of the time before the part actually fails: the first notification most small AS/400 shops have that something is happening is when the IBM tech shows up at the door with spares. As for software faults -- I personally know of one, sorta. Actually that was on the AS/400's predecessor, the S/38, when a file index got corrupted and the system took a week to notice it. We ended up with some truely strange long-hairs from Rochester dissecting the system over a long weekend trying to understand the problem. Never heard of it happening again. These things just don't break very often.
...city did not renew a maintenance contract with IBM because it cost more than the PC network.
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Considering all cost caused by administration, crashing PC servers, viruses and such things, i'd rather assume, that running an AS/400 box is much cheaper than running a PC network.
Especially database administration (including backup/restore) is much easier on an AS/400, because the database is integrated into the operating system (and vice versa).
Even Microsoft tried to replace 23 AS/400 boxes with 1200 NT-Servers in 1999/2000, and they couldn't make it run, so they are back on the AS/400s now.
(Read the full story, an article called "IBM's Frank Soltis, uncensored":
http://k-lug.org/pipermail/klug/2000-October/0065
http://www.linux.ie/pipermail/ilug/2000-November/
regards,
octogen