[tetha]

You also see this in system administration circles/SRE quite a bit. And I mean, that's one of the important skills you have to learn in the operative trade: You should push for clean solutions. You shouldn't use clothesline to transfer power. You shouldn't use an EOL OS to run systems.

But as much as you push, sometimes you need to put on the rubber boots and gloves going up to your shoulders and figure out a somewhat safe way to run some Windows XP based machine controller in an environment. Or wrangle some Java 1.6 thing back into function. Or figure out the least security reduction to support some old system not supporting modern crypto.

And yeah, usually the idea is to put trusted isolation layers around the dumb idea we have to deal with, as the water hose suggested in the article.

[hot_gril]

Ugh. I asked if you could use consumer-grade SSDs with an HP ProLiant equipped with hardware RAID on one of the StackExchange sites, forget which. The only response I got was, "Oh, too cheap to buy the official ones? This website is for professional sysadmins, it tells you that when you sign up." Which btw it doesn't say anywhere.