Very slow booting and running and braindead OS's 4532

It is not ugly or inelegant.

You take cheap hardware, and throw the book on it in terms of good protocol, software and software design, and in about two days of installation time you have a redundant, load-balancing firewall; redundant switches; mirrored-raid'ed disks; real-time replicating databases; and a SPOF-free application environment.

OK, the application code may not know in advance where it will run, but as long as it keeps all persistant data in a database it does not matter.

You can do this with at least two totally different code paths as well; although in that case there are some database replication challenges.

Where else can you do that; even duplicating all the software ?

I tell them the truth; it is a VPN with a company-mandated firewall, and that I can run diagnostics from that firewall.

VPN's are a huge breadwinner for ISP's, and the VPN participants tend to move "e pluribus unum", so if it doesn't work in one place the whole VPN tends to move. Lots of marketing hype around this.

This has led to "corporate vpn endpoint" being the same kind of magic incantation as "fax machine" was in the modem days. The words that will fix things according to procedure and otherwise let you alone.

I still use a modem once in a blue moon; but the ISDN TA has gone totally out of use.

Bankers truly guard their databases.

I was recently involved in a small project where a large insbreastution pondered in which jurisdiction it's database was to reside.

That is, where is the update master. Hint : It was not put in any dirigiste, snooping-friendly country.

-- mrr