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9 Comments on A Peek Inside Iran’s Granite Mountain Missile Production and Storage Fortresses

  4. Does Oracle back up their data centers? Probably not.

    About ten years ago I was employed by a dot-com called Zuora. At the time they were positioning themselves as a credit card processor. Their entire business plan was based upon riding the “subscription economy” wave. Their developers were all in Singapore.

    This created an awkward state of affairs because the people I was expected to support were 8000 miles away and living on another calendar and spoke another language and had root access to everything – but I was the one responsible for securing the infrastructure.

    In every dot-com I have ever worked for, developers always have the ear of management. One of the software developers is usually one of the first hires. The software developers are seen as the geese that lay the golden eggs. The support staff are largely seen as annoying, uncooperative and easily replaced because when the company was young the developers also did support; until it stopped being fun and started interfering with their sleep and their social lives, then they complained and the company’s first real sysadmin would be hired – but he (or she) would always be seen as a second class citizen, not as a contributor, and this would be reflected by end-of-the-year bonuses.

    (Sysadmins, of course, have a different perspective. Software developers are notorious for turning over products that are not ready for production. No documentation. No instructions. No start scripts. No shutdown scripts. No logging. No comments in the source code telling us what they are trying to do. Constant upgrades. We do all that. We get flack for annoying them with tough questions. We make them feel stupid and lazy. We handle the problems at 3 AM. We are the ones who turn a piece of shit Javascript website that keeps halting into 24×265 websites that the world looks to to help them live. And we are the ones who get fired when problems occur. You are not seen as a fellow professional – you are seen as their custodian, there to keep the digital toilets clean so the developers can excrete their code without being distracted by details like filesystems filling up, even though they are the ones fillling up the filesystems. I no longer advise people to study UNIX or Linux except for personal use. There is no professional future in being a systems administrator, in the United States.)

    Basically, software developers live in a world of ABSTRACTIONS.

    C-suite assholes ALSO live in a world of abstractions.

    But systems administrators live in a world solidly grounded by reality and physics.

    So developers and executives get along just fine and support staff are left out in the cold.

    I provide the previous material as context to the following statement:

    Zuora didn’t do backups.

    Yes, that’s right, they didn’t back up ANYTHING.

    The director of IT told me “we don’t need backups; everything is mirrored”. By this, he referred to disk mirroring, where the contents of one hard drive partition are mirrored to other partitions, on other drives, so that if the drive fails, the data, and the partition, remain visible.

    This is the sort of decision that emanates from software developers.

    Mirroring is part of a high availability suite of services but it only addresses availability – it does not address security.

    What happens if someone gets in overnight while we are all sleeping and erases all the data?

    What happens if someone has been stealthily making small modifications to our infrastructure and we catch them? How do we prove they made modifications?

    Looking back it seems not impossible that Zuora was a criminal enterprise of some sort and that the credit card transactions that it handled may have been a cover for any number of other things, masked by their official role as credit card processor.

    Fast-forward a decade or two to a data center run by a bunch of dodgy, stingy dot-coms, IE, Oracle Corporation, etc, in a foreign country where everyone is a contract employee from another country where you are encouraged to mind your own business, and ask yourself: are these the sort of diligent people who would regularly back up their customers’ data?

    Or would they tell each other, “it’s mirrored” and go back to surfing porn?

    I would encourage Iran to #GoMax, if I may introduce a Charlie Kirk hashtag.

    Oracle is a scourge. Remove it.

    Modest reminder: https://salanave-runyon.org/herbie.html#08jdl

    Reply

  6. Thank you to Richard Childers for that incredible expose of how IT industry really works. Like a sausage factory, you don’t want to know what they really put into the product as long as it is smoked and tasty. Reminds me a bit of what was a pretty good movie that exposed the IT industry called “Disclosure”, not many movies have come close to exposing what a ponzi scheme of pedophilic destruction Hollyweird and Silly-Con Valley are up to. Incredible post from Richard C. –Thank you.

    Reply

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