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Date:      Fri, 14 Aug 2020 04:35:50 -0400
From:      Aryeh Friedman <aryeh.friedman@gmail.com>
To:        Olivier <Olivier.Nicole@cs.ait.ac.th>
Cc:        FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: OT: Dealing with a hosting company with it's head up it's rear end
Message-ID:  <CAGBxaXmu6ufw3hcHc6UBJuS2mS=N9x411sfp97YeqKu7LySLCQ@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <wu7o8ndmyh2.fsf@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th>
References:  <CAGBxaX=_8V2s=mP4vOMgWS14g7%2B-je4CbBEmTF-6bA_YJ4rggQ@mail.gmail.com> <wu7o8ndmyh2.fsf@banyan.cs.ait.ac.th>

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On Fri, Aug 14, 2020 at 4:19 AM Olivier <Olivier.Nicole@cs.ait.ac.th> wrote:

> > The client based on a) recommendations from our old hosting provider who
> > decided to go out of business due to the owner retiring, b) the maker of
> > the devices we have connectected to the system (actually the manufacturer
> > is another fine example of head up the ass... stuff like not even knowing
> > what "concurrency" was when asked a question about how the devices
> interact
> > with the vendor provided front-end/DB [which sucks and thus our ground up
> > rewrite of it] and when we pressed the matter where told "don't go down
> > that rabbit hole", this confirms something another poster said that any
> > software company that uses MSSQL get weird quickly -- the version of the
> > devices we have current use MySQL but the next generation only "support"
> > MSSQL since it is "better" than MySQL) and 3) by the fact that they were
> a
> > publicly traded (NY Stock Exchange)
>
> You had no saying in the choice of the hosting company, so you can
> report to your client that given the circunstances, you cannot help and
> that your client should deal with the matter. There is a limit to what
> we can do technically.
>

Nice in theory!   The reality is the marching orders we have from the
client (who refuses to bend on this) is "make it work, I don't care how you
do it, just make it work! ... or I will find new programmers who can make
it work"...  Good luck on the client doing that because the system is 100%
custom (including the DB engine due to no existing DB meeting the
regulatory requirements of end-to-end encryption [instead of just encrypted
file system and encrypted fields.. the tables themselves need to be
encrypted]) which we have wrote/maintained over the last 8 years including
the occasional new feature (the new feature that is causing all this fuss
is the client wants to autopop the windows MySQL DB the devices use to
avoid duplicate hand copying of data between two forms and due to licensing
costs we forced to do the testing on the production system thus need the
hosting company to set up suitable near real time backups of the MySQL DB).


> You mentioned that piort 25 is open, you could modify some SSH client
> and server to start the connection like and SMTP protocol, launch
> STARTLS then so some SSH inside. If the 1st packed is an EHLO and
> everything after is encrypted, they cannot see what is inside.
>

We actually use port 25 for SMTP so this is a no-go (part of how the
devices work is they send a email when they have data to upload and then
have to be told remotely to  upload it [this is one the scripts we have])


-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org



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