Comments on: Innovative Kansas Department of Labor Site Paves Way for Web 3.0

By: Innovative Kansas Department of Labor Site Paves Way for Web 3.0 …

Innovative Kansas Department of Labor Site Paves Way for Web 3.0 … — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:15:14 +0000

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By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:43:20 +0000

@Donald – Even if all of the processing for this site occurs on a mainframe that is unavailable at certain times due to backups, processing that has sequential dependencies, etc., they should still be able to store application requests in a staging database that can then later be fed into their primary system.

I doubt their website has a direct connection to the mainframe anyways. Most of the systems I’ve seen that include mainframes have RDBMS staging databases that are the immediate backends for web sites. The data is then transfered back and forth from the mainframe via feed files (simple text files) on a scheduled basis.

By: Donald Belcham

Donald Belcham — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 20:25:29 +0000

I once worked on a system which had a Service Agreement that required 11.5/5 @ 98% up time. It was a hard goal to program for, but we managed to get around it. The whole reason for the 22.5 hrs/day and weekend downtime was that the mainframe database services were perceived to be off line during their backups and batch routines. This was proven to be only for writes to the database and since our system predominately read data, we were able to far exceed those availability hours.

By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 17:10:29 +0000

@Kyralessa – So far your theory about the little old lady is the best fit.

However, for things to fully fall into place, the site would have to be hosted on her computer and she would have to shut it down before she left each day.

I definitely feel as though we are making progress in solving this mystery.

By: Kyralessa

Kyralessa — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 16:59:24 +0000

Perhaps they figure that if you enter your claim during working hours, you’re less likely to be faking it?

Maybe the “web app” is a big facade; you enter your data, and a little old lady on the other side gets a printout and types it into a greenscreen app. But she only works from 7a-7p.

By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:34:15 +0000

@Karl – Good point. If I were only making $25k a year, then I would probably be trying to supplement my income by running some porn or internet gaming service from their servers at night. That would certainly explain why they are unavailable at night.

By: Russell Ball

Russell Ball — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:31:42 +0000

@Jason – Since they wouldn’t be losing any money or customers if they had periodic downtime during off hours, it seems like they could allow data entry at night while having their IT staff simply wait until the next morning to handle any problems that arise during that time.

I could tolerate a ’sorry, experiencing temporary problems’ page a couple times a month much better than I could handle a page telling me to come back during office hours.

If anything, it would make life easier on their IT staff to move to a 24/7 schedule because it would even out the activity and decrease the amount of stress on their servers. This would probably greatly decrease the number of firefighting episodes their staff had to deal with during the day because of the servers being under too much load.

In fact, moving to a 24/7 model would probably even save them lots of money in the long run because they wouldn’t have to invest as much on infrastructure to handle the load spikes during the day.

This approach just seems ridiculous from any angle I look at it.

By: Karl Katzke

Karl Katzke — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:10:34 +0000

Great find! As a gub’mnt IT worker myself, I’ve seen some amazing examples of stupidity and politically motivated shenanigans that look like they’d result in this.

My guess is that the application kept crashing during off hours, and the IT guy that runs the server is probably paid about $25,000 a year (because that’s all that’s been budgeted since he was hired in 1993.) In a meeting, the director in charge said she wanted the app running 24×7. The IT guy countered with “I’m not paid enough for that.” The IT guy’s manager and the manager in charge of the program probably “met in the middle” and agreed that the IT guy would guarantee that the app would run during business hours, but during off hours it would be “off”.

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:54:53 +0000

Oops, “play” should be “pay”

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 16:54:06 +0000

Perhaps they just don’t want to play their staff for 24/7 support and help mitigate the risk by turning off the systems. Maybe their IT staff is the happiest IT staff in the world.