Throw in a mysterious comment that says "Don't change anything below this line or everything breaks" and it's complete.
"We don't know why this works, but it does, don't touch it." would also be acceptable.
tool
joined 2 years ago
Some places are insanely polluted to the point where you wonder how a whole company could be so braindead and essentially poison themselves.
"That's the future guy's problem, my problem is making money."
No need to wonder. That's how.
Unless you're really deep into a particular provider's unique-esque products (Lambda, Azure AD, Fargate, etc), this is exactly why things like Terraform exist.
Places like that never learn their lesson until The Event™ happens. At my last place, The Event™ was a derecho that knocked out power for a few days, and then when it came back on, the SAN was all kinds of fucked. On top of that, we didn't have backups for everything because they didn't want to pay for more storage. They were losing like $100K+ every hour they were down.
The speed at which they approved all-new hardware inside a colocation facility after The Event™ was absolutely hilarious, I'd never seen anything approved that quickly.
Trust me, they're going to keep putting it off until you have your own version of The Event™, and they'll deny that they ever disregarded the risk of it happening in the first place, even though you have years' worth of emails saying "If we don't do X, Y will occur." And when when Y occurs, they'll scream "Oh my God, Y has occurred, no one could have ever foreseen this!"
It'll happen. Wait and watch.
You're literally describing the system that controlled employee keyscan badges a couple of jobs ago...
That thing was fun to try and tie into the user disable/termination script that I wrote. I ended up having to just manipulate its DB tables manually in the script instead of going through an API that the software exposed, because it didn't do that. Figuring out their fucked-up DB schema was an adventure on its own too.
I don't even let things communicate on /30 networks via HTTP/cleartext...this whole thing is horrifying.
"No, I can't come out tonight, I'm optimizing my CONFIG.SYS file so I can have a mouse AND my Soundblaster work at the same time!"
The fact that a majority of even the older Gen Z (like me) have been reported to not understand file systems or general tech and internet knowledge is scary.
I think it's to be expected. When the majority of your tech use is with a phone/tablet, concepts like filesystems are abstracted away from you.
The same goes for troubleshooting that tech, as the most helpful error message you generally get from those kinds of devices boils down to a graphic of a sad face and a completely useless "Something went wrong" type of error message.
"I don't need to comment this code at all, it's pretty self-explanatory, I'll remember this 100% no problem."
Scene cut:
Me six months later, staring blankly at the code like the monkeys & The Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, desperately trying to unravel the workings of my ADHD brain and just exactly why the seemingly innocent and innocuous-looking function named "dontFuckingTouchThis" is the lynchpin preventing the whole goddamned thing from falling over and going tits-up.
I still use reddit for researching problems at work, but that's it.
Run it in a Sandboxie sandbox. It can run any application in a Sandbox.
Or just spin up a lightweight VM. Could even run it in a Docker container.
If it's that old, I'm betting it doesn't use HTTPS for its connections. You could do a network packet capture on the XP machine (or if you can find one, hook it up to a network hub with another computer attached and capture there) while performing the "clear error" action and find out how it works/what you need to send to it to clear the error. You could also set up a SPAN port on a switch and mirror the traffic on the port going to the printer to capture the traffic, if you have a switch capable of doing that. If not, you can get one off Amazon for about $100.
It'd be pretty simple to put together a script that sends the "clear error" action to the printer after seeing how it's done in the packet capture. I've done this numerous times, the latest of which was for a network-connected temperature sensor that I wanted to tie into but didn't (publicly) expose an API of any kind.