The problems began when we had to test against some of the browsers that are used by organizations that support the users. Most of the software that myself and my coworkers use are modern browsers and operation systems, Firefox 3.x, IE 7.x-8.x. But as always there are those outliers. During our testing we encountered a major support organization that was still using IE 6. This seems very strabge since the company that I work for is very strick about keeping software current, I seem to be upgrading my tomcat about every 4-6 months. So it is strange that a large support organization was and still is using old outdated software.

Well needless to say we had to call off the upgrade of SSL because of that. This whole episode wasted 4 hours of mantenance time all because of IE 6. Why in an organization the size of this do we continue to used such crusty old moldy exploitable software? The world may never know.

It was suppose to be a quick update, tweak one parameter to lower the BOSH timeout and restart the tomcat server. It should have taken 10 minutes, maybe 20 with testing, to complete this update. I left the office two and a half hours after I started the update. Seems the networking guys were doing some firewall work that “should not have any effect” on my work, but rather than pointing the VIPs to one data center at time, well they pointed the external DNS name to both data centers.

So I wasted about 2 hours chasing ghosts. Sometimes work is just too much work. Oh by the way.. It looks like the update did not work