Muppet Broke The Datacenter Every Day, In Its Own Weighty Way
The Register, Friday, September 13th, 2024
Mr Snuffleupagus turned out to be all too real and bad at database resilience
By Friday the weight of the world presses down upon even the most enthusiastic IT pro, which is why The Register uses the last day of the working week to lighten the load with a new instalment of On Call - the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of struggling out from under tech support burdens.
This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Harp" and in the 1980s worked for an insurance company that ran an exotic database coded in Fortran.
"The system had a ton of cables, data points and the like running under a raised floor in a sealed, heavily air-conditioned room, with a lead back to the mainframe," Harp explained.
So tangled and elongated was that stuff under the raised floor that the system was known as "Snuffleupagus" - after the Sesame Street character that has fur, a trunk of sorts, no ears, and maybe-kinda looks like a woolly mammoth.