Within UltraMegaCorp, there is a strong push to move jobs offshore. This is done in the name of improving the bottom line of the company, because they can get equally-competent people overseas for a fraction of the cost of USA domestic employees. Now, I agree with this in part. We have some employees on our team among the thousands employed by UltraMegaCorp in India. Some of these employees are competent, motivated, and have come to know the job well in the year or so they have been working on it.
Unfortunately, those two people are really, really busy.
Exhibit A: Service request from QA tester. Background: A “V440” is a Sun Solaris machine. In the case of this particular machine, it is running Solaris 10, a UNIX variant. Solaris, for those who don’t know, is nothing at all like Windows except that it runs on a computer. With memory. And hard drives. And, you know, configurations. And stuff.
Now, you would think that a highly-qualified, highly-trained Quality Assurance Engineer would understand what operating system he is working on. In fact, it probably is part of the spec against which he is testing. See if you can spot the error.
—————————————– Service Request Details —————————————–
SR #: 38-3471727291 Date Opened: 10/3/2007 04:49:30 AM Requestor: Mgobudana Raghiva (MGORAG) Job Title: CONTRACTOR: Engineer – Performance Engineering (Superlative) Contact Phone #: Office Phone #: (555) 555-1212 Location: Bangalore Time Zone: Manager: MGROBERT
SR Title: Increase buffer size in SMGV440S999 machine
Description:
When we executed the test, observed the following errors.
Action.c(63): Continuing after Error -27790: Failed to read data from server “smgv440s999”: [10055] No buffer space available
Try changing the registry value HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\ tcpip\Parameters\TcpTimedWaitDelay to 30 and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\ tcpip\Parameters\MaxUserPort to 65534
Try also increasing the size of the NonPagedPool Memory as follows:
1. Open the Windows Registry. 2. Select Find>Data and search for the term ‘SharedSection’. 3. This search should return a path similar to this: My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\ Control\Session Manager\Sub Systems\Windows 4. Modify the second value to 4096. 5. Reboot the machine.
Details:
UID: performanceguy PWD: superstar26
Thanks Mgobu.
This is a bit like dropping off your clothes dryer at the local Toyota dealership and asking them to fix the noisy fan in your furnace…
You wanna test like that huh ?
So other than the fact that the directions for increasing the size of teh MomPagedPool Memory is given as a Win OS, the ‘Error 10055’ means that Windows has run out of TCP/IP socket buffers because too many connections are open at once.
So um yeah – Testing a Solaris OS with Win Scripts is an interesting approach.
Well, in their defense…
Well, in their defense in that small area, the software application was one developed originally on Windows. Although it runs on Linux and UNIX perfectly well, many aspects are still very “Windows-like”, including error codes.
His Google-Fu was weak, grasshopper.
But yeah. You would not believe the number of people who try to tell us we don’t know our jobs when we tell them their POWER4, RISC-based AIX big-endian binary application won’t run on an x86, CISC-based Linux little-endian platform. It, of course, is all my fault; I’m simply too incompetent to make the changes on their behalf, and if I were to just follow the simple instructions they provided, the problem would go away.
—
Matthew P. Barnson
Slacker
Couldn’t you just reverse-engineer it, then recompile it? How hard is it? C’mon Matt!!! Or just run a virtual Solaris machine on top of a nice, 2GB desktop Linux machine, and load the app on that. Performance won’t suffer, and everyone will be happy! 😉
Or convert the whole thing to a shell script application, or JAVA. Then it would be cross platform! That should take you 3, 4 hours max…right?
Source code…you don’t need no stinking source code!
Or getting back to his original request, can’t your write a conf2registry interface while would allow you to change the configuration files (if Solaris uses .conf files, which I don’t know) using the amazingly wonderful Windows registry interface.
Hmm…let’s keep all the system configuration information in one file, the System registry hive, and the software configuration information in another, single file. Also, let’s not provide an automatic or user-friendly way to back those up. AND, when they get corrupted, as they do, let’s all but force a reinstall of the OS!!!
M$ is the way, the truth, and the light. *nix has nothing on proprietary, buggt code, baby!
My $.02 Weed