| ▲ | kjs3 3 hours ago | |
Sorry to derail...but that brought up some bad memories. The networking company Wellfleet (became Bay Networks thru merger with Synoptics, then died as a chunk of Nortel Networks) had a management tool called 'Site Manager' (SM, aka 'Site Mangler' aka 'S&M'). SM was a monstrous Java app that papered over the (horrifying) fact that everything on a Wellfleet router was configured with SNMP (full-body shiver). Oh, there was a CLI, but even a hard-core CLI pilot like myself couldn't face stuff like "set wflplnterfaceEntry.2.192.168.10.10.3 1" all day long. Wellfleet clearly employed no software engineers, only monkeys that hammered on keyboards and piled cruft upon cruft to the SM codebase. The end result was that every release of Wellfleet device code (down to point releases) relied on a particular version of SM, which, of course, relied on a particular version of Java. Now, since virtually no site over a certain size could count on every device running the same version of code, you had to be able to switch between a couple of versions of Java to run a given version of SM. And, as a consultant to Wellfleet shops, I had to be able to run all of them. I got really good at multibooting Windows, but in the end I had a 'Wellfleet' laptop modified a bit so I could easily pop it open and swap disks, each one for a different version of SM running on a different version of Java. Good times...it was not. | ||