Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained

re: Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained

rob — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:35:25 GMT

Different role? Hmmm... Interesting

re: Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained

Keith Combs — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:50:05 GMT

Yea, you think I have a great job now? It just got better...

re: Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained

Brad Rutkowski — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 05:56:07 GMT

Not much of an explanation as to what happened.

re: Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained

Keith Combs — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 18:45:31 GMT

Brad, it is what it is at this point. Rest assured there are many tough questions being asked. If you've ever been responsible for a data center service that has an incident, then you know what type of inquiries are taking place. Data center operators know what I mean.

This brought back vivid memories from early in my IT career. I was working in a large data center. We had a batch job that takes all weekend to complete that was running. One aspect of running the job included loading data via removable disk packs. Think data center mainframe DASD in the removable form.

The operator doing the manual loading of the disk packs was apparently bored and not paying attention. He was eating some peanut M&M’s and one fell down into the open disk machine. He dropped the new disk pack in placed, locked it up with the handled and it spun the candy up into the disk pack trashing the disk and processing time of the batch job. This meant the job did not complete on time and the CICS region was not up on time Monday morning. A new policy was implemented following that… no more food and drink on the data center floor. Harsh.

Regarding the software side of this, again, lots of tough questions are being asked in and outside Microsoft. I must admit however I am a believer in the object of WGA and like technologies. Regardless of whether I’m running Linux, UNIX, OS X, or Windows, I want to know the binaries are from the OS vendor and are safe. It needs to be as painless as possible and resilient.

I have no idea where this will lead but don’t think for a second there isn’t laser focus on this right now. There is.

re: Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) - weekend issue explained

rob — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 20:23:50 GMT

Shoot, I've been there many times. You have a problem... You pretty much know what caused it but on the off chance there's something else involved you don't want to be left looking like you don't own the solution. In fact, at one place I worked at (which I won't name) we had a name for that process... We all got together after the fact in a formal meeting informally called a Blame-Storming Session. The purpose of which was to come up with an explination that we could present to an executive. They wern't too fun usually.. :-)