> Having no understanding as to the technicalities involved, the project was given the go ahead by the directors after several meetings with a vendor
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Been there, got the T-shirt. Had the "sysadmin" job title and everything. And then the Board of Directors announced they had bought a complete data backup "solution", and I was to implement it forthwith.
Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.
Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.
Gotta love decisions from above without asking anyone doing the actual work with said tech/product.
I worked at a company that bought 2 oracle servers (racks? Not sure, over $200K though, over 10 years ago now) because it was going to magically make everything better. We were on mysql at the time and there was a large effort to rewrite all our table/column names to work with oracle (there was some stupid length limit and maybe some characters weren’t allowed). The project was abandoned and the exec who signed off on it had left to screw up some other company.
It was many years before we were able to reverse the name changes (they made writing queries miserable and the names were confusing due to the abbreviations or lack of vowels) and more years still after that before we managed to turn those racks collecting dust into NAS storage for backups.
Had anyone bothered to ask me, I could have told them that their "solution", being a Windows-based software package, wouldn't run on their database servers, which ran SCO Unix. Which was quite adequately backed up with tar and cpio, and rotating off-site tape storage.
Later, the desktop support group was surprised by the delivery of a couple of pallets of Compaq laptops and desktops with Windows 3. This was before "internet" was really a thing. The desktop guys set them all up, made sure they could log in to the Novell servers, and went home. However, the main application the clerks used was on the SCO boxes, which were accessed with NCSA Telnet. The Compaq machines had Ethernet ports, but their customized Compaq Windows version didn't have TCP/IP drivers, so the next morning they were frantically putting the old computers back so people could work.