A group of gun dealers and a few state lawmakers are filing suit to keep PICS from shutting down for four days in September. Rendell’s office had this to say:
“Although we understand that there is no perfect time to upgrade the system the simple fact remains that the system must be upgraded,” Rendell spokesman Chuck Ardo said.
Rendell is looking at possibly delaying the upgrade. As an IT professional, I can tell you there’s no reason for a multi-day outage. Any upgrade should be able to be completed in a few overnight hours, at worst. At best, things like this can be done with no downtime at all.  Banks manage to do it, online retailers manage to do it. I’m not suggesting this is a deliberate attempt to screw gun owners, but the PA State Police might want to consider hiring more competent IT help.
Hat tip to RightwingprofÂ
You should have suggested it was deliberate, because it most certainly is.
The only other option is that they are pig stupid. I am not suggesting they are.
A few hours?
Man, it’ll take longer than that for the vacuum tubes in the old CPU to cool down. And those refrigerator sized disk drives take a lot of moving.
I’d laugh, but I’ve heard enough from people in Government IT to know you’re probably not joking.
…but the PA State Police might want to consider hiring more competent IT help.
*snork* Like the state government would A) hire a competent IT person and/or B) let them do their job the way its supposed to be done.
On the state’s side : Maybe its run on an old mainframe, with code nobody knows anymore, and taking it completely down for two days (four is an engineer’s estimate… remember the Scotty Rule – double your worst case time) might be the only choice.
Depending on what kind of upgrade we are talking about (If they had any qualified people working for them) the changeover shouldn’t take but a few minutes to swap the new system for the old.
Seriously, if the sys admins don’t have the sense to have the replacement up, running, and tested, before shutting down whatever it is they are upgrading, then they really have no business working in IT.
Even if the system is going in the same physical location (precluding a hot swap) a few hours is all it should take maximum.