Denying Interruptions of Service
April 18, 2014
For the last 18 hours, the 3000 Newswire’s regular blog host TypePad has had its outages. (Now that you're reading this, TypePad is back on its feet.) More than once, the web resource for the Newswire has reported it’s been under a Denial of Service attack. I’ve been weathering the interruption of our business services up there, mostly by posting a story on my sister-site, Story for Business.
We also notified the community via Twitter about the outage and alternative site. It was sort of a DR plan in action. The story reminds me of the interruption saga that an MPE customer faces this year. Especially those using the system for manufacturing.
MANMAN users as well as 3000 owners gathered over the phone on Wednesday for what the CAMUS user group calls a RUG meeting. It's really more of an AUG: Applications User Group. During the call, it was mentioned there’s probably more than 100 different manufacturing packages available for business computers which are like the HP 3000. Few of them, however, have a design as ironclad against interruption as the venerable MANMAN software. Not much service could be denied to MANMAN users because of a Web attack, the kind that’s bumped off our TypePad host over the last day. MANMAN only employs the power of the Web if a developer adds that interface.
This is security through obscurity, a backhanded compliment that a legacy computer gets. Why be so condescending? It might be because MPE is overshadowed by computer systems that are so much newer, more nimble, open to a much larger world.
They have their disadvantages, though. Widely-known designs of Linux, or Windows, attract these attempts to deny their services. Taking something like a website host offline has a cost to its residents, like we reside on TypePad. Our sponsors had their messages denied an audience. In the case of a 3000, when it gets denied it’s much more likely to be a failure of hardware, or a fire or flood. Those crises, they’ve got more rapid repairs. But that’s only true if a 3000 owner plans for the crisis. Disaster Recovery is not a skill to learn in-situ, as it were. But practicing the deployment it’s about as popular as filing taxes. And just as necessary.
Another kind of disruption can be one that a customer invites. There are those 100 alternatives to MANMAN out there in the market, software an MPE site might choose to use. Manufacturing software is bedeviled with complexity and nuance, a customized story a company tells itself and its partners about making an object.
There’s a very good chance that the company using MPE now, in the obscurity of 2014, has put a lot of nuance into its storytelling about inventory, receivables, bill of materials and more. Translating that storytelling into new software, one of those 100, is serious work. Like any other ardent challenge, this translation — okay, you might call it a migration — has a chance to fail. That’s a planned failure, though, one which usually won’t cost a company its audience like a website service denial.
The term for making a sweeping translation happen lightning-quick is The Magic Weekend. 48 hours of planned offline transformation, and then you’re back in front of the audience. No journey to the next chapter of the MPE user’s story — whether it’s a jump to an emulator that mimics Hewlett-Packard computers, or the leap to a whole new environment — can be accomplished in a Magic Weekend. Business computers don’t respond to magic incantations.
The latest conference call among MANMAN users invoked that warning about magic. Turning the page on the story where Hewlett-Packard’s hardware was the stage for the software of MANMAN and MPE — that’s an episode with a lot longer running time than any weekend. Even if all you’re doing is changing the stage, you will want to test everything. You don’t want to be in middle of serving hundreds and hundreds of audience members at a time, only to have the lights grow too dim to see the action on the stage.