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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/14/09
So... assuming that was technically possible, part of the timebomb then looked and functioned like the backup software, but erased the tapes while reporting that it was backing up data, and did this far enough in advance that all of the sets of tapes were wiped?
Could happen... in theory... but it would take a hell of a lot of work and understanding of the systems they were working on - deep enough to send commands to the tape drive from an original program, or maybe run some console/invisible instance of the real backup program with instructions to silently wipe tapes, while the frontend displayed normal status.
...or they sat there themselves some time and wiped every tape manually - ideally from someone else's account or an admin/service account to defeat the audit logs.
I don't buy it though - that would be some unprecedented malice, risk, and orchestration to make it come together.
10/14/09
10/14/09
Ima Set It Straight, This Watergate
I Can't Stand Rockin' When I'm In Here
'Cause Your Crystal Ball Ain't So Crystal Clear
So, While You Sit Back And Wonder Why
I Got This Fucking Thorn In My Side
Oh My God, It's A Mirage
I'm Tellin' Y'all It's Sabotage
Sabotage
Artist: Beastie Boys
10/14/09
This kind of thing happens all the time. Admins get lazy, tapes don’t get checked, backups are partial, corrupt, or blank, and that is that. I’ve worked at places that had over 12 months of garbage backups when I started, amazing…
If it was sabotage the person would have made sure the backups were useless (not hard to do) and then nuke the system, not delete backup tapes he/she had no access too… I have to believe they did off site storage of tapes.
10/14/09
10/14/09
I've seen at least 10 Admins fired over the years for bad backups and once the CIO all the way down to the PC Tech that was swapping tapes (8 or 9 people including the AS400 guys even though they didn’t loose data they didn’t have backups either) were fired which is also when I started there... What a mess that place was, but it was a fun job.
@OldSchoolGadgetLover: It's not as bad now, but back in the day usually what prevented people from having proper backups was cost. If you did things the right way you had at least 2 weeks of daily's and then 3 months of weeklies and a year of monthlies, but a few of the companies I worked for didn't even have enough money to buy tapes for the monthlies...
I went into a school district around here where I told them to buy a 50 pack of DLTs with their new servers. They cheeped out and bought 6... S I X tapes for 6 servers, I couldn't believe it. I must have brought it up 20 times and they kept saying "sorry we don't have the money". They had also bought an external array which had I think it was 8 or 12 drives in R5 which they were using as storage and backup (again against my advice).
Long story short that array failed due to the incompetence of a Compaq tech and they lost their data.
10/14/09
We found out the hard way that the dailies were worthless because we failed to trap for file locks skipped backing up the incremental changes when users were signed into the system and using files. same with weeklies if batch jobs were running against key files.
When we had a data center AC failure, resulting in multi disk array failures, this little problem came to light, and many full grown men cried.
Guess some things change... and some things stay the same.
10/14/09
I've had some close calls, but never a complete loss. Doing Net/Sys Administration (14 years now) is too forking stressful when your doing it solo. I'm actually an ass hair away from going back to school and switching professions or maybe just do PM instead.
10/14/09
So the timebomb not only wiped all production data, all backup data, all system drives, and also caused the tape jukebox to load each individual tape into the tape drives and wipe all of them (a very time consuming task)?
Not to mention this doesn't even jive with the original explanation that Hitachi was upgrading the SAN and it inadvertently killed off the RAID groups.
Sounds like somebody is fishing for sensationalism to me. Go figure, they said this to Apple Insider of all people.
10/14/09
I just can't believe TMobile didn't have requirements that these guys had to meet.
I just can't believe a company like this didn't use Iron Mountain or a Safety Deposit box or the like to store their tapes. Every day those tapes should have been rotated out with ones from at a minimum 2 weeks prior (daily, obviously weeklies you keep longer).
10/14/09
as far as i know, backup tapes are to be kept off site once backup is complete. Or at least off the contact of any server or machine until the time it is actually really needed.
So how exactly could a backup tape get erased? I've been learning servers and doing my own experimental shit about servers and I've never heard of backup tapes getting erased, until now. And, as far as I know, only a few uses backup tapes these days. They moved to a more revolutionary method called "server mirroring" and uses a more robust system of backups through an off-site server system where backups are stored (and that deletion can only be performed if done within the backup facility, and can not be executed from a remote server).
So I wonder how this saboteur actually performed the trick? I simply can't imagine how stupid the server have been setup for this to happen.
10/14/09
Even with off-site servers you always keep off-site tape. Static copy greater than *
10/14/09
It doesn't have to be some conspiracy...easy explained by apathy.
dimes
10/14/09
[en.wikipedia.org]
@van_line: Occam's Razor is "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity."
[en.wikipedia.org]
10/14/09
However, you are indeed correct that Hanlon's Razor would be the proper eponymous adage.
...now I'm off to douche up someone else's day :)
10/14/09
hanlon is what i think dimes was looking for, occam was what i hadn't heard of yet so just quick quoted it.
10/14/09
I'd never even heard of hanlon's razor until I heard it on the internet.
10/14/09
10/14/09
10/14/09
10/14/09
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10/14/09
Even offsite ones [what, didn't have any?]? Even the ones at the backup site [what, didn't have any?]?
That's a neat trick.
10/12/09
10/12/09
The first being that the platform itself was kind of shoddy. Lots of little quirks got to me, like programs not closing when I closed them, eventually causing the phone to become unstable. Additionally I always find myself having to soft reset my phone after I've been in a dead area for any lengthy period of time or else I stop getting messages (SMS/Voicemail). This was not limited to any one WinMo phone either.
Second of which was the lack of decent QWERTY phones. Most of them didn't feel right or natural.
I had always vowed to go back to the Sidekick one day. My dreams were quickly realized when I heard that Danger was bought by Microsoft. Finally, I might get to see my own Godphone realized. A Danger Sidekick hardware device with a modified version of WinMo designed especially for it.
I was excited to say the least. I had looked forward to seeing the imminent offspring of Microsoft and Danger. Now this news. This news is grim indeed. Now, not only will I not get my dream phone, but I will never see another new Sidekick again.
All hail Microsoft, the dream eater.
10/12/09
10/13/09
Microsoft's consumer OS business (ie. Windows) is worth billions and represents a significant portion of Microsoft's annual profits.
However, even the top heads at Microsoft have known for the better part of a decade now, that desktop computing is not the future of consumer level computing.
Look around you, between setop boxes, netbooks, smartphones, etc., the shift away from the desktop is already happening and at an alarming rate. All this before Cloud became a seriously viable option as well.
With the slow decimation of traditional desktop computing, Microsoft is ultimately looking at the complete erosion of their consumer level OS business - they have maybe a decade left before it all goes poof.
Modern business is all about profit and appeasing the all powerful share holders. You do not lose upwards to 70% of your revenue stream and get to remain a viable business. But over the next decade, this is exactly the scenario that is looking to play out for Microsoft, unless they do something.
Change. The only constant in the universe. Also, the only option for Microsoft. You can view this particular change at Microsoft in one of three ways.
1 - there are not too many (recession proof, even) industries which are even big enough to by itself, replace Microsoft's consumer level OS business outright. The nigh insatiable entertainment industry (games, music, films, television, etc.) is just such an industry. Over the next decade, should Microsoft gain a sizable enough toehold into the entertainment industry, gains from it would offset losses in an ever shrinking consumer OS industry - crisis averted.
2 - telecommunications is an even larger industry than entertainment. And with consumer level computing leaving the desktop for more mobile waters, it only makes sense to follow where the buffalo wherever they may roam and pursue the consumer into portable waters.
So once again, over the course of the next decade, should Microsoft get a sizable toehold in the telco/mobile devices industry, once again they are looking at an offset in future loses in the consumer OS side of their business.
3 - Even more interesting, is the fact that entertainment experiences are the "killer app" for the entire mobile computing/mobile telco industry. Let's face facts, what would an iPhone be without the ability to sync with iTunes, play music, videos and games? It'd be a pretty shitty experience that no one in their right mind in this day and age would play $200 for, subsidized or not. Why would we really need the speeds of 3G, 3.5G or 4G networks were it for the entertainment these networks allow to be piped to mobile devices?
Why get a toehold in one multi-billion industry, when you could get a toehold in two. Two industries as fortune would have it, which are linked like conjoined twins. Even should Microsoft fail to get a proper toehold into one, if they still managed to succeed at getting a toehold into the other, they still wind up getting a toehold into both by default.
In short, the answer to your question is foresight and the necessity that this foresight brings with it. There is little doubt that Microsoft's enterprise divisions are in any immediate danger of going the way of the dodo. However, their entire consumer OS division is maybe a decade from going belly up in the bottom of the toilet. The safer bet would be to continue to push deeper into enterprise solutions (which they are, believe it or not). However, the biggest payoffs are where mobile computing, telecommunications and entertainment overlap. And this is why we are not likely to see Microsoft (and for that matter, every other multi-national on the planet), walk away from trying to be the hot stepper at that party, anytime soon.
Compared to what they stand to win in the long run, the failure of Sidekick and Pink are less than a drop in the bucket. They'll learn more from this failure and later profit more from the knowledge they have gained, than they ever lost. Look at the situation with Rare (as someone pointed out above) as an example. They lost $350 million acquiring Rare. They made mistakes, and now Rare is a pale shadow of what they used to be. However, the hard lessons they learned from that clusterfuck, having now been applied, have yielded a turnaround for their games division, which has gone from over a billion in the hole, to turning a profit of over a billion a year.
10/12/09
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10/13/09
10/12/09