IT Nightmares Story

Hello everyone!

Today I wanted to share a story of an IT nightmare that occurred to me. I will not disclose any private information but I am hoping to hear some feedback from some of you steemians!

The story starts with slowness in one of our main servers where we host all "sales" information. We have been running this server using Windows Server 2003 (Unsupported OS) and an SQL 2005 version (Unsupported Software) for over 15 years now and believe it or not, we are now in 2017 but still using software a decade old.

The server started behaving differently using up 90 % of its memory allocation causing the "Sales Software" to become slow and unresponsive at times. The company's higher ups are really fed up with the situation and they are demanding a resolution for this problem as soon as possible, as they describe this piece of software as the "life of the company" which is completely understandable, any decent company will take priority over a situation like this.

The problem we face is very simple, we are completely understaffed and a support position which is what I was originally hired for; suddenly turned into a system administrator job, also training specialist and technical documentation writing which none of it was under my job description. Like the sucker that I am, my thoughts were if I show I can do all these things, I would become more valuable to the company and my compensation would greatly increase since taking up so many different jobs (I was wrong).

We have now undergone massive issues with our internal and cloud infrastructure that we simply do not have time to manage as our support duties do not stop and the only way of achieving this would be to work 80+ hrs a week which is not something I am willing to do, my family and mental sanity are dependent on it and I do require my time off.

As I mentioned earlier our management wants a resolution but they do not want to spend the money required to resolve the problem for good. I have advised them that we need to get the latest version CRM supports along with OS and SQL that are also supported by the platform. Their response is always the same, fix it with what we have which is the wrong approach altogether. If the company has grown exponentially their information systems should follow the growth with it and we are limited to a 32 bit OS that runs SQL and CRM on the same box! (Insanity). Given the limitations, there is not a lot I can do to improve the situation as a 32 bit OS will only use 4 GB of RAM and I get asked the same question by individuals who have absolutely no idea on how a computer works, the question is always the same - Why don't you increase the memory?- to which I respond, there will be no change to the performance since the OS is 32 bit, even if I put 30 GB of ram only 4 GB will be "usable".

As I continue my investigation to resolve this issue, I tried some hacks to make it work on a 64 bit OS but now I am having all kinds of issues with SQL since the application does not seem to work with anything higher than 2005 which takes us back to the same old path of no resolution. The only viable resolution is to pay for the upgrade but it does not seem that it will happen anytime soon, in the mean time I get the threatening emails to resolve this problem but my hands are tied...

When our next meeting happens it probably won't be great but I will not take the stress of having to reboot the server at all times of the day so they can work while a solution has been provided. It is very irritating how sometimes management is completely disengaged on what goes on in the company and their only sign of progress is the dollar bill without understanding that if things do not get upgraded we are sitting on a bomb waiting to explode, and those small details that they considered "low priority" will cost them their existence in the market.

I wanted to hear from the community to see if anyone has any recommendations as to how to deal with a problem like this and if anyone has experienced anything similar and what they have done to resolve the problem. I am not a fan of band aid fixes but that is all that they seem to want and this is causing me way to many headaches as I have to reboot this server all the time, sometimes even when I am having dinner with my family, which is taking my own time away because management has decided to cheap out on their decisions and would rather have me 24 hrs monitoring this server and causing a constant stress level in my head rather than resolving the problem itself.....

Let me know what you think and I look forward to your comments, Thank you for taking the time to read my nightmare.