Posted on 06/23/2012 1:14:44 PM PDT by Kartographer
Over the past week, various entities controlled by bailed out UK-bank RBS, focusing primarily on NatWest, have seen clients unable to access virtually any of their funds, perform any financial transactions, or even get an accurate reading of their assets. The official reason: "system outage"... yet as the outage drags on inexplicably for the 5th consecutive day, the anger grows, as does speculation that there may be more sinister reasons involved for the cash hold up than a mere computer bug.
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
Many we should check Wiki and see what it says?
If banks close and power is still on, cash is the only way to purchase goods. Within days, there will be nothing to buy as companies cannot pay for their supplies to make goods.
However, it will all shut down anyway because trucks will stop moving. Money and fuel delivery are connected, plus truck drivers do not drive without pay, but they will have nothing to deliver.
It’s a vicious circle, drop one out of the circle, and the rest won’t work.
These ‘hot spare’ systems are great for hardware failures.
However, if it is a software bug, and you start up the ‘hot spare’ system, it is likely that the same bug will immediately occur on the backup system. I have seen this happen several times in large enterprise systems.
“However, if it is a software bug, and you start up the ‘hot spare’ system, it is likely that the same bug will immediately occur on the backup system. I have seen this happen several times in large enterprise systems.”
That’s why I like the “hot spare” isolated from the production system and kept a little behind on updates/changes.
I crack up when people claim to have backup systems - that they never actually test with a disaster drill. I have seen companies smugly go to their backup system - and they discover that it isn’t.
Back in the 80’s, my old boss had me take our systems down, and rebuild a copy from bare metal, armed with a stopwatch. We barely did it at all, and it took five times longer than “estimated”. It was a great way to find the weaknesses. If you can’t do or can’t afford to do these things, you are performing on a tightrope without a net and are wasting the money that you ARE spending.
I well remember a little incident from about 15 years ago. A nice young lady had written a batch job in C++ that seemed to work OK in system and user acceptance testing. When moved to production, however, the high volume of data caused a seg fault and a core dump resulted.
That would not have been too bad, only we had a nasty unpatched Solaris 8 OS bug. Since the core dump was bigger than 2 gigs, the OS interpreted its size as a negative number and wrote it onto the disk backwards, overwriting the root filesystem and bricking the machine.
Since the server was completely unusable and would not boot in single-user mode, nobody understood what had happened. We just went to the DR server, and resumed normal operations. As we ran through normal processing, the scheduled time for the new batch job came along, and it ran, and then we had two totally unusable Solaris servers.
Then, of course, we started to put two and two together.
I would be willing to bet that the downgrade plus all of the liquidity problems going on over in Europe are having a negative effect on RBS’s cash flow.
People should be sure to keep a few hundred in cash in their gun safes “just in case”, and not keep everything in just one bank.
How did that problem get resolved 15 years ago? I’m intrigued now.
We had to get help from Sun to fix the servers. They figured out what had happened, and told us to apply the OS patches.
We were out for a few days, but it was only an internal system, departmental profitability. The users weren’t pleased, but they had to live with it.
So do I but it's counterfeit. Who's going to be able to check then?
Just kidding, SS
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.