Anyhow, Journyx is how we turn our minutes into dimes. It is time clock software that, ostensibly, runs on Linux. For the past squillion and a half years, since nineteen dickety two, we've run it on a desktop box running Debian Old As Old (older than etch). It has performed in fits and starts with the temerity of a 2 year old and the capability of a pygmy nuthatch. Recently we started having problems between it and a badly hacked connector that exports data to Quickbooks (itself a bag of hell so awful that I refuse to acknowledge it exists).  Mind you, this was all supported by journyx ie kosher.

Until recently.

A few months back Journyx started doing neat stuff like hey, some people had no hours even though they'd entered all their time properly (and in seven hundred different projects in fifteen minute increments). Some suddenly found their hours charged to bizarro-world projects (Lex Luther and His Cakes v2). Some users ceased to exist.  This is a problem, as you can imagine. Our book-keeper, who is my age but far far far more attractive in every way, had to enter everyone's time by hand into Quickbooks for two months in a row, and was threatening to kill everyone if the problem was not fixed, like, soon.

Journyx support, after veiwing logs and logs, sez "we ain't never seen no errors like this, son. Like this one what says 'missing opcode' since that means python is missing and hot damn it ain't, so it;s your server hardware is bad" and a bunch of other fictional nonsense that basically boiled down to: they'd never had a client as long as us, as patched as us, and as Linux as us. They blamed it on our hardware having errors, though the OS showed no signs of this. They insisted it was our hardware, which is totally stupid. So they wanted us to troubleshoot it by installing the same environment on new hardware.

Which is both impossible and proved nothing unless we also started with the same journyx version and patched over and over to the current rev, which they would not do. So fuck them, we installed a totally new OS on totally new hardware.

SO last night I started an install (on another desktop!) of RedHat 4ES update 7.  This morning I installed Journyx, then formatted and re-installed when it turned out I'd accidentally installed it slightly wrong and they had no un-install method.

Here's the deal: our old time keeping server was accessible from the outside world, with SSL. Journyx doesn't support apache2 (having been coded in 1998) so our old timekeeper was a Debian box running apache 1.33, a Debian box that had literally never been updated. In our DMZ. For those not entirely in the know, that's a bit like putting a "please don't steal too much gold" on your screen door.

We now have a totally updated obsolete OS, but journyx still won't have apache2 support for some unknown period of time. So I install RedHat4 without any Apache, and use journyx's built-in apache, which is 1.something and doesn't support SSL at all. Thus, our timekeeping server is inaccessible from outside our network.

This is change, and our users hate change almost as much as they hate Osama Bin Laden. I spent the morning propping up a server with an old OS, installing and configuring a POS app, importing all of our payroll data, getting it running, then waiting for it to fall over while many users emailed us with "I know you said our timekeeper isn't accessible from outside but I can't reach it from outside!" and "I know you said that our timekeeper is now http://journyx:8080 but I can't reach it from https://oldserver!"

Then I helped fire a guy, locked out some accounts, deleted some important shit, and left work.

I got home, and there was a chocolate brown bunny in the yard.  I got out of the car and it hopped up to me, sniffed my foot, and sat there munching grass, staring at me.

I went inside and got it a carrot.

It ate the carrot, and hopped off.

I think it will be named Harvey.