r/talesfromtechsupport • u/fuknthrowaway1 • 6d ago
Medium Your software license is about to expire! Please call us at 1-976-..
Earlier today I read someone else's recollection of the worlds dumbest DDOS and was reminded of another dumb DDOS.
The company had a job estimation tool that ran on a Linux box. Visit a web page, feed it a list and a customer name, 30 seconds later you got a link to a properly written quote in the format that customer preferred.
We'd had it six years and it never gave us any trouble, not even when we moved from Redhat to Debian.
Well, until September of one year, when it started throwing up "Your three year software license is about to expire! Please call us at 1-976-.." whenever the administrator uploaded a new quote template or updated pricing.
A whole lot of money had been paid for what was supposed to be a perpetual license, so we called and complained. The vendor blamed it on version checking nonsense and told us that if you just clicked "Okay" on the pop-up a few times it would go away.
A few it was not. It took clicking ten or twenty times, really quick, before the pop-up finally vanished and everything worked again.
About a month later the dialog started popping up on a different group of users, managers, whenever they tried to edit an existing quote.
This caused a small bit of concern, a dozen tickets, and fourteen phone calls before we stopped trying to explain "Just go to town on the button" and sent people around to furiously click.
We called the vendor again, they asked us to change a setting in the config file and assured us it wouldn't recur.
And it didn't, until January 3rd, when everyone started getting the pop-up.
By the time the first support person made it into work at 7am there were 100 tickets and 40 voicemails from users that started at 6.
An hour later, when the bulk of the company arrived, the voicemail was full, there were 400 tickets and climbing, and the 6am people started opening tickets with the main help desk as well so they were calling directly.
There was a quick conference where it was decided to go with the nuclear option. Ticketing was shut down company-wide and the support phones were taken off the hook.
The mass email blamed it all on the vendor, with the perfectly BOFH explanation that computers are dumb and sometimes they think zero is greater than nine, like back in Y2K, and that we'd be sending people around to fix it.
Three days later, after thousands of clicks and nothing else being accomplished by any one from any tech support team, we got a root-cause back from the vendor.
They'd changed how their software was versioned. They used to release one major version every year, as sort of a checkpoint, and they were stopping that. Their next version, instead of being 9.0, was 8.2.0. And they'd changed the code that tracked licenses as a result, adding the minor to the major to determine how old the software was and clipping numbers.
Our perpetually licensed version was 66.66. The license server was barfing on it.
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u/Percemilo34 6d ago
A funny thing I remember seeing was about a license for some wireline (fixed telephony) testing simuation tool. It was a proprietary product, but the company that made it shut down and disbanded somewhere around late nineties. We had an ancient setup running it, specialised hardware for connecting the pinout of a wired phone line to a pentium I pc port. The funniest part was the loading screen for the application. It was a perpetual license, but the app itself had a visual part of the window where a copyright logo was present, along with the current year timestamp. The little macro outlived the company and the licensing protection by at least two decades, marching boldly on as if the software was still being licensed even though it stopped well over twenty years ago.
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u/warlock415 1d ago
I'm reminded of some software that claimed to have "fixed" its Y2K problem, so we set the clock to 12/31/99 23:59 and waited.
The next time it booted, it displayed the year 19100. And then 19101, in 2001. The last I saw was 19104...
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u/Stryker_One The poison for Kuzco 6d ago
Sounds like an OLD PLM software package called Parts & Vendors. The company closed down but I believe the head programmer of the company tried provide (unofficial) support for a while, but then he, died. From what I understand there is now a fairly small (but hardcore) group of current and former users trying to keep the software going.
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u/littlekenney13 6d ago
I’m not sure who is more obsessed and confident in their methodologies - PLM/sustaining/change order management people or GD&T experts.
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u/Glass_Ad5197 6d ago
That smacks of incompetence from the vendor. Given that, and their solution to just click till the button goes away I would be switching vendors right away
They changed their version numbering system, and were not competent enough to write a licence server that would take the change, and seemingly-arbitrarily-chosen perpetual version numbers, into account?
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u/ComputerEcstatic1227 6d ago
IIRC Firefox and maybe IE had a similar issue when their version was going to change from a single digit before the decimal point to two digits. Suddenly a lot of things started barking (barfing?) when they couldn't handle the new format.
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u/eddietwang 6d ago
Using "greater than or equal to" on a version check instead of just "equal to" is absolutely hilarious.
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u/weirdal1968 Hard Drive Hero 6d ago
Given the demonic license number the server must have been powerbarfing pea soup.