Story time: I once worked part time with a company, and their DBA was doing a project to look up all the IP addresses that had been logged into one of their database tables. For every address he was running a bash script to do the reverse lookup.
This was going to take a few days to run, largely because it was forking 10-20 times for every IP address, most of the lookups themselves were fairly quick (though some weren't). I explained to him that forks are fairly expensive operations, and every line in his shell script was 1+ forks.
I thought this would be an easy win, I picked up a multi-threaded DNS lookup tool and showed him that it could look up a thousand addresses in < a second. "Oh, so I can just replace the "nslookup" with this other program in my script?"
I explained that he would need to make a file with all the IP addresses he needed to look up, I'd run the program on a server at our data center (to not clog the office T1), and then I'd give him back a file containing "address,name".
"Oh... So I'd have to correlate each address to a name myself? I can't do that, I need to run this script." In my head I said "You're the DBA, how can you NOT correlate this data?"
I worked in a hospital years ago as an IT Tech. I realized one day the printers were not on a separate VLAN. The network guy didn’t seem to care so I wrote a short telnet script to submit a 1000 page (blank) print job to his office printer, flash all the lights and change the display to PC LOAD LETTER. I hit enter and 5 min later sure enough there was a ticket in my queue to diagnose the printer. I killed the script, set the lights to normal and went to his office. Never was able to replicate his complaint...
Replacing his automated process with 2-3 manual steps and with a dependency on you. Yeah, he probably said whatever popped into his mind to make you go away.
This was going to take a few days to run, largely because it was forking 10-20 times for every IP address, most of the lookups themselves were fairly quick (though some weren't). I explained to him that forks are fairly expensive operations, and every line in his shell script was 1+ forks.
I thought this would be an easy win, I picked up a multi-threaded DNS lookup tool and showed him that it could look up a thousand addresses in < a second. "Oh, so I can just replace the "nslookup" with this other program in my script?"
I explained that he would need to make a file with all the IP addresses he needed to look up, I'd run the program on a server at our data center (to not clog the office T1), and then I'd give him back a file containing "address,name".
"Oh... So I'd have to correlate each address to a name myself? I can't do that, I need to run this script." In my head I said "You're the DBA, how can you NOT correlate this data?"