Budget
The term "Budget" shouldn't suprise anyone nowadays. We're all used to read about it and/or curse it (and whoever is responsible for it) more or less on a daily base.
If you're still in the glorious period of your life when the only trouble you have is to go to school (that is much better than get to work because man that's tiresome yoh!) and the only 'budget' you know about is the money that your parents toss at you every now and then, be happy. Because it doesn't matter how "cheap" your parents looks to you and you've no clue about what's hidden behind the "simple" act to toss some money your way so you stop whining for 5 minutes.
However, if you actually are chained to the rock together with a million other individual and forced to fight tooth and nail for a scrap of the company's "budget", you know what it means.
The idea behind the "budget" is simple: at some point (at the beginning or the end of the month/year/century/millennia/wathever), everybody sit around a table and start talking about money, how much there are and how many can be spent on what, all depending on the amount and the possibility to get more on a later date and what you want to do with them.
In this sense, the idea of "money" became a lot more "Schrödinger" like: you don't know for sure how much there is in the box until you've spent them and then discover that those where an illusion and now you're screwed.
In many cases the whole situation spiral down in a swamp of conspiracies, behind-the-back deal, backstabbing, blackmailing or open war that Games of Thrones doesn't even begin to measure. Because the idea should be to keep everyone in the loop and allow partecipation in the whole thing (aka: how much money do we actually have and how much do we expect) and then appeal to everyone's honesty to actually look at the situation and decide on how much your project really need and can contribute to the whole thing (seriously, your project really need a couch made out with the fur of albino-tigers cubs?). In reality, what happens is that everybody try to mask his own pet project as the "best next thing" and that "it will make us reach beyond imagination" while everybody else project is "utter garbage and it will probably cause a plague of zombie on the land".
So instead of a collaborative process, it degenerate into an inter-dipartimental war and in some cases it can even create real fractures in the structure of an organization.
And this without even starting to think that in many cases, the "budget" doesn't even cover the "unexpected" events, that I've never understood why we keep calling them "unexpected" sine in many cases they are very well expected. And when they shows up, things gets... interesting.
And after this monetary introduction, we'll talk about $spendex&spandex. A servie company that was providing "services". Indeed.
Those people starte in the early '90 in building a portfolio of various competence, from the "core" group of 3 guys and kept expanding until, at present, they were kinda "jack-of-all-trades".
The major problem was that, after almost 30 years, their IT system was also a "jack of all trade" but not in a good sense. In the sense that was kept together with spit and chewing-gum.
Some stuff was Solaris, some Windows 7, some Windows 2000 Server, some Debian and some MacOS. I thought that the C64s were probably used for the printers but...
One nice morning of March, one of the SLs received a mail that... some part of their hardware that was used for some software, is going to be tossed in the ditch, and the problem is that the company that used to host that stuff doesn't exists anymore. The company was acquired by another one at the end of the '90, that other company then went busted and the whole thing was acquired by another company that was then merged with... anyhow, the gist of the thing is that the hardware is now property of some other company that has no interest in keep that stuff alive and are going to shut it down and then burn it.
You can imagine SL reaction to it. After a number of shriek and curses, the 3 stooges managed to figure out more or less what kind of software was running on that stuff and decided on a rescue plan.
The idea was to migrate the whole thing on a brand-new, "Cloud" system based on Linux. And then tell the other company to go F. themselves.
Now, I can't really complain about such a plan but... there is a but. Before saying "let's migrate to a new system, you should check what does "migrate" means.
After some messing around they discover that the environment is based on Solaris 7. And they want to migrate to Linux. The software is an hodge-podge of perl scripts and other stuff written in C. Stuff that has worked kinda ok for the previous 20 years but has never been documented or maintained.
And this is when "we" shows up. Because our "job" was to "migrate" to the new system.
Sl - ...so the first step is to migrate the software on the new environemnt.
Me - Yeah, nice, but who's doing that?
Sl - Well, you of course.
Me - No, we can't do that.
Sl - Why not?
Me - Because, as you noted multiple times, that stuff has been written for a system we do not support and won't be installed on the new environment, we have no idea how it works and as such is very possible, basically certain, that it won't work right away and will have to be modified and fixed for the new environemnt. And we are sysadmins not developers.
Sl - But it shouldn't be too complex. I mean a couple of days should be enough right?
Sure, everything that you do not understand has to be dead easy.
Me - That point is debatabel, but the problem is, what if it doesn't work?
Sl - What?
Me - Yes, what if it is a lot more complicated than it looks and it doesn't work? What's the "plan B"?
Sl - Hummm... what do you suggest?
Me - How about getting a software house and have them re-build the whole thing, maybe with a decent documentation? So this stuff is not only working but also maintenable?
Sl jump back, scared by the idea of spending more money.
Sl - A software house?!?! And how much does it costs?
Me - I have no idea, I'm not a software house.
Sl - And how long would it take?
Me - I just said I'm not a software house.
The discussion went on for a while and then Sl decided to get back to us after discussing the matter. About a week later he was back.
Sl - Ok, we've decided that you are going to do just the software transfer.
Me - We discussed that last time didn't we?
Sl - But not on a new system.
Me - ...pardon?
Sl - The old environment is based on 6 machines with Solaris 7, then there are 2 load balancer (that are as old as the servers) and 2 firewalls and some switches and some other stuff... and we found out that a friend of a friend of a friend has an environment that is very similar that we can get for not-that-much-money and host on another hosting provider. This way we can migrate everything on this environment and keep going.
Me - ...hu... what?
Sl - Yes, our budget doesn't cover the rebuild of the software.
Me - So... you're ok in spending a load of money to get an OBSOLETE system and host it somewhere but you don't want to spend money in porting the software to a newer system?
Sl - Precisely.
Of course. Because... budget.
Davide
06/08/2019 09:26
