Monthly Archives: January 2012

End of January

Yikes, time flies!

We’ve been dealing with several emergencies that sprung up in fairly short order, and working on adding redundancy to our systems so these things don’t happen again.

It’s a long story, and essentially started when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, the vendor and tech support for most of our servers.  Suddenly the prices for tech support contracts multiplied (yes, you heard right, more than doubled) to the point where we couldn’t afford decent support plans for several of our important systems.

Since then we’ve found out that servers are kind of like cars in that they apparently have a built-in sensor for “warranty has expired, time to break down now.”

This day and age being what it is, I suppose I should add a disclaimer in case it isn’t TOTALLY FREAKING OBVIOUS that I was joking.  I’d probably lose my job if I seriously accused Oracle or anybody of purposely making systems fail if the support contract level wasn’t high enough.  Besides, they wouldn’t need to– systems fail often enough on their own.

…aaand I should probably quit writing before I say something that might really get me in trouble.