An OCC Idea

Sysadmining like it's 2008 · June 25th, 2025

I've dealt with my fair share of infrastructure in my days, and usually it's period appropriate. Sometimes that period is a little fuzzy, like Windows Server 2012 R2 just EOL in 2023, so while by name we immediately think "gee that's old" it's not really that old. But sometimes I get to manage a real gem, you know, that rare line of business system that's really showcasing the power of Windows XP, or how cool Server 2003 was. Or maybe you're fortunate enough to use a CNC machine powered by DOS 3.1 and a handful of bat files. Or the truly rare ancient Linux distro running business basic applications written in the late 80's!

The small business world is such a weird mesh of all of these questionably old technologies keeping core business operations going. We technologists all realize this is ridiculously scary in a real sense, but seriously, when is the last time you could say your software was so well built that it has been used for 10, 20, 30, hell 40 years straight! It is wild!

All of that vintage goodness has me thinking about what I should do for OCC this year. See I've come into possession of some nice enterprise 100mb Cisco networking, enough for a small branch network in fact. All of it is of course battle tested and weather worn, pulled straight from production a decade ago. Well, it should have been pulled a decade ago, but that's another story.

In conjunction with my stack of 100mb networking gear I've got access to a stack of Syteline ERP documentation and installation discs, plus the same for the supporting 4GL Progress database software. Some period appropriate Windows server & workstation discs as well, think Server 2003 and XP. Oh and a full set of physical reference manuals for Syteline as well!

So here's my thinking, I have enough random gear to setup a mini "business" network, complete with ERP system, domain control system, the works! Lots of crazy legacy infrastructure that I have way too much experience using professionally, but never for fun. It's a weird idea I know, but last year I just used the same old Alpine setup as the year prior, and this idea is a complete rejection of that in a way. Plus what else am I supposed to do with all these salvaged systems? They'd end up e-waste otherwise, and maybe this will be a good excuse to go through some CCNA materials and figure out if I want to spend the effort and capital to certify that knowledge.

This idea has been lovingly named

Project Half Duplex

(Yes I know all the gear I displayed is woefully out of date and likely not sufficient for this. I also have eve-ng in my homelab which is where all the real studying happens. But it will be fun to build a little 100mb LAN for all my weird little OCC infra to live in.)

Which is a whole other train of thought actually. It is becoming increasingly easy for someone to sound like they know a lot about everything. The age of LLM based AGI has moved the bar lower when it comes to sounding knowledgeable. One poorly worded question and you get paragraphs of talking material, bullet points to summarize, and you can converse to get deeper and deeper. Which naturally means that that thin veneer of knowledge is just as easy to break through, or run up against insurmountable obstacles. Which further reiterates the value of actual expertise and validated credentials. The people who are willing to put the effort into actually learning something will be in high demand when the technical debt machine that is AGI collapses in on itself.

It will be fun to watch.

Anyways, those are my current OCC musings. It's on the way, but not quite here yet (looking like it'll be around the week of 7/7 or 7/14, and that always has me super excited. Usually because I want to gather up some potential new gear, but I've got quite the stack of salvaged hardware to run through this year already!

Side Note

At the beginning of this year I told myself that I would try and publish a blog post every month, at least one, and it looks like I managed to hit January, then missed February, but followed it up with two in March! I was on a roll, and then I totally wasn't. Now the year is half over and I need to catch up. So expect several updates in the near future! I've been busy making material changes to the homelab and my little stack of hand crafted software, so I have plenty to talk about, just need to make the time to get it all down!