Category: Techspeak

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Information Disclosure: A Real World Example (non-IT)

A friend of mine collapsed on New Year’s Eve (no, not from drinking) and was admitted to the regional hospital. I called last night to ask when visiting hours were. I gave his name and was transferred to the department where he was (in the ICU). The gentleman I spoke with there told me to come by after 8AM to visit my friend. I told him I preferred to call ahead, since I live about an hour away, and he said that made sense.
This morning, I called to see if I could visit. However, I specifically asked if he was admitted. (Now, I’m not sure exactly why I didn’t say “My friend was admitted, can I come visit” instead, but that’s just the way the words came out of my mouth). I was asked for my friend’s name. I gave it, and was told “that patient hasn’t given permission to give out his status.”
I pointed out to the person on the phone that she had just confirmed to me that he was admitted, which was my original question. She replied “Okay…” I thanked her and hung up.
What conclusions do you draw from this?

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Painful Lesson on Legacy Software

My mom is in the middle of a (potentially painful) lesson on legacy software. Namely, don’t use it. She has… *ahem* had all of her addresses in an ancient copy of Parsons Technology Addressbook 7.0. I forget exactly how many years ago Bob Parsons sold to Broderbund and they killed the product off, but it’s been a while. Complicating matters, the software appears to use a proprietary format MS Jet database to store the info in, and I’m having trouble (read “okay, what possible formats could an ABA file be?”) opening the stupid thing with anything but a text editor. Continue reading “Painful Lesson on Legacy Software”

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RT 3.8.0 – Stable Again Thanks To InnoDB

Thanks to a couple of helpful folks on the rt-users mailing list, we were able to track down the cause of our problems. We experienced some corruption in our MySQL databases. I found out that you should “never” run RT on MyISAM tables and always use InnoDB. Oddly enough, we’ve run on MyISAM for years and never had this problem. However, we did have issues with slownes, for years, and it’s something we’ve been struggling with constantly.
for t in $(mysql -unotreal -pdontbother --batch --column-names=false -e "show tables" rt3);
do
mysql -e "alter table $t type=InnoDB" rt3;
done
Running this script revealed an error with the “Tickets” table.?Fortunately, the data itself in our tables was not corrupt, just the indexes were. ?myisamchk was able to repair these and allow us to convert all tables to InnoDB format. Once I fixed that error, I was able to convert everything over to InnoDB.
I was thrilled to see that, once the conversion was finished, RT popped right back up into place, with all of the tickets in their usual spots. And, as a bonus, the thing’s a lot faster than it ever was before.
Lesson learned. Next time, read the instructions more carefully.