Cannot find server

The BBQ Pit
1

Hopefully this will not be an issue, at least not for long, but I’m hopping mad right now.

You know when you go into a doctor’s office, and they have you fill out a form asking you if you smoke, have ever had cancer, and who to contact in case of emergency? And about a million more questions? Wouldn’t it be great if you could fill that form out online, in the comfort of your own home? Well, that’s what we’ve done here. It was supposed to be a hospital-wide application, but the out-of-house programmers who set it up couldn’t get it to work. I got my part of it up and running, and it’s an integral part of one department. It’s quite a complex little app, too, which I have no desire to rewrite.

I just went to check something inocuous on the page, and got Cannot find server. So I looked in explorer, and the server no longer exists. I e-mailed the guy in charge of it, and he answered back that Marge the Clueless Fuck told him to remove it. Hey, if it’s of no use to her, it’s of no use to anyone.

This is bad. This is all kinds of bad. I cannot tell you how many kinds of bad this is. I’ve already had one call from a confused patient. I don’t want a second one. Heads will roll over this, and mine won’t be one of them.

The IT guy hasn’t gotten back to me, he can’t be paged, and he’s not answering his phone.

Marge, you stupid as a mother fucking mother fuck, we already know how stupid you are. You are incapable of writing down a URL, and had to call me every day so I could tell it to you AGAIN. This was the URL, by the way, to the page of your own project. The one you cared so much about, remember?

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. About six months ago you told the IT guy to delete all the files from that server. You know how bad that it impacted us, remember? Because I told you back then what a jackass move that was on your part.

Fucking moron.

2

Sorry, but it sounds like this may fall under the “fuck me once, shame on you - fuck me twice, shame on me” rule.

Why on earth would you give Marge a second chance to hump you?

3

I’ve seen a lot of docs lately, and that app sounds like a very useful thing.

4

What makes you think he’s in a position to stop her from screwing up the computers?

5

That’s pretty fucked up.

I don’t mind people who don’t know anything about computers. My mother doesn’t know anything about computers. But my mother also doesn’t pretend that she knows about computers. The worst people are those who know shit, but still act like that know something.

What is Marge’s title/job description? Because i would be pretty hesitant about deleting anything called a Server unless the order came from someone pretty high up. or from the tech guy himself.

6

tdn, document everything this pogrocket’s decision is costing you, your division/office and keep documenting it. I suspect that the only cure for Marge will be getting her removed from a position where she might believe she has any authority over IT matters.

And try to at least estimate monetary costs for this fuck up. For some reason there are management types who just seem to ignore headaches to IT types, as being what they deserve for being IT types in the first place. But if you break it down to dollars and cents, they can sometimes see that this moronic idiocratic autocrat is more trouble than they’re worth.

7

I think Marge is an anesthesiologist, but she was in charge of this project for a while. And if she tells the IT guy to do something like this, there’s nothing I can do to stop her. Especially if I don’t know anything about it.

I just heard back from the IT guy, and it’s worse than the time before. Last time, they just deleted my files. This time, they actually removed the physical machine. I don’t know it the drive has been wiped, but I bet it has.

This is bad.

I have backups of the most important files, but there are a bunch that are going to be hard to reproduce quickly. As it stands, this app will be down for at least a day, and that’s if they give me a new server immediately. And if it doesn’t have the same URL, we’re really fucked. A bunch of invitations have been sent out, and they will all have dead links.

8

I have no idea. But the chief of bariatric surgery will. And I’ve told him, and my boss, about it.

This will not be pretty.

9

Nor should it be. I hope to hear she goes down in flames for this, honestly. It might be understandable, if she’d never been told before that such idiocy affects other people, but as it is - BBQ time.

10

I interpreted it as this was an outside IT vendor / Server provider and that Marge, the clueless fuck, worked for them not an internal department with the same organization.

You still have to wonder though, why does Marge, the clueless fuck, have admin rights to the server. Something is amiss in the network admin rights structure of this organization - especially since this is not the first time this has happened.

11

At the risk of sounding cynical - there’s a reason that doctors in general are accused of suffering from a God complex.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that tdn’s work place promotes people based on how they handle extraneous jobs, and prefers to have some kind of doctor in charge of every aspect of the business (with the possibile exception of physical plant - and I’ve seen hospitals were a doctor was overseeing that!) because doctors are so smart, after all. :rolleyes:

12

I guess I should explain this a little better.

Marge is in the department of surgery, as am I. Tim is the IT guy. Mike is the outside vendor. For purposes of completeness, Jim is my boss (and a surgeon), Dave is the chief of surgeons who will feel the impact of this.

Originally the project was to be for any patient receiving anesthesia, so its impact was on a pretty huge part of the hospital. Marge was one of the project leads. Mike built the app, which didn’t ever really work. I tried to help out getting it working, but we could never figure out why it didn’t. I didn’t have any more time to spend on it, but my parting advice was to do the whole thing over, using some more proven technologies.

In the meantime, I co-opted some of the code to build a special version of it for Dave. That’s been in place for several years now, and is used pretty heavily. I’d estimate that a good 700 patients have used it over that time.

As it turns out, Mike could never get the new code to work either. The entire project was scrapped, and it will never come to be, at least not in its present form.

I think what happened is that either Marge contacted Tim or he contacted her, but they decided that no one was still using the server. I can’t blame Tim, as he oversees quite a bit of stuff. And Marge is listed as the owner of the machine.

So they scrapped it.

I’m in contact with Tim right now. I’ll never get that machine back, but he backed up the data and can restore just the parts I need. I’m pretty sure I remember what those are. But first I have to fill out an online form, which I can’t access from home. I’ll do it first thing tomorrow. And that’ll mean that I own the new server. No one can touch it without my say so.

The only other hitch is whether I can get the same URL. It’s registered with Marge. She has the right to refuse to give it up. If I can get it, then the impact of this will be minimal. If not, then I’ve got a bit of programming and testing to do. And a whole slew of patients will be put out by it. They’ll have dead links.

Ugh.

13

To follow up on this, I don’t think there will be much. If we lose patients over this, well, how much does surgery cost? That’s what we’d lose. But we have some redundancy built into the system, so we have ways of getting around it. If this happened to our other server, though – hoo boy, we’d be really hosed. There are probaly over 10,000 patients who’d be affected by that. Good thing Marge doesn’t even know about it.

14

I predict she will be promoted and get a fat raise, and the innocent will be punished. Better keep your head down.

15

Jeebus. Good luck with that. And watch your back. Marge sounds like a real prize (most sleepers IME are a bit too full of themselves). Yikes.

16

I maintain hardened servers on Mars - as in the planet Mars.

Seriously, these clueless PI types need to delegate things and stay the Fuckity-Fuck out of it.

Sometimes it gets so bad that you keep your own server, just to maintain your not-fucked-up(NFU) version of things. You can then work properly despite your PI’s best efforts otherwise.

17

It sounds like you need a configuration control board. Nobody is allowed to install, remove, or modify an operational system, hardware and/or software, without permission from the CCB. Change requests are submitted to the CCB, with supporting documentation, including test results for the proposed change.

18

Update: We’re up and running again.

19

So you found the server?

20

Oh, I thought this thread was going to be about the message I get once a day or so when trying to log into the dope. That thread I could get into.