[djmcmath]

What a nightmare -- that's just plain awful.

If it's any consolation, the US Navy isn't doing a whole lot better. My submarine spent 4 months at the pier for a whole lot of shiny new computers, including all of sonar, most of fire control (the stuff that takes sonar information and does useful interpretation of the data) and the entire ship's LAN (which contains some remarkably useful stuff, and without which all ship's operations come to a halt).

The fire control computers don't talk to the sonar computers, completely obviating the point of having fire control computers in the first place. The sonar computers overheat and shut down, because nobody apparently bothered running any kind of thermal analysis as to what happens if ambient temperature rises above 65F. That means that anytime we do anything unexpected with ventilation in the sonar computer space, we can't hear ("see") anything. The ship's LAN is no better -- most of it is installed in a space that was never meant for that many servers (at least we have decent gear), so overheating is a routine problem. We've performed a variety of our own modifications and have managed to keep temperatures within specification in there. But that doesn't fix the problem of the other server rack that they installed which was heavy enough to slightly alter the shape of the ship, disrupting the weapons handling system ever so slightly. Insubstantial? Sure, until you need to load a torpedo into a port-side tube, at which point the whole system binds up and bends lots of bits of expensive metal.

Good stuff. I'll stop ranting now -- suffice it to say that I sympathize.