I forgot this mailing list existed until I received the recent messages. It's good timing too, because I feel a need to rant.
I hate Siebel. Plain and simple. For those who forget, Siebel is an application development framework used in creating CRM applications. In other words the software that large call centers and client-facing businesses use. McAfee uses it for their support website, etc. Siebel is an octopus of sorts; it has hooks at the Web layer, the application layer and the database layer. It's designed around a true 3-tier architecture. I work for a government contractor and we recently endeavored a major release and some OS upgrades, including some patches to iPlanet, etc. With increased load after the upgrades we ran into limitations of the Siebel software. Siebel never told us that their internal load balancing between the web servers and application servers cannot scale beyond 10 different application servers. They left us thinking that it could scale to 36 application servers and the software and default configuration files are designed around this 36 server limit. After opening a severity one support ticket and waiting FOUR WEEKS we finally received a response that our architecture was invalid; an architecture that they validated two years prior. Meanwhile, during this four week period we rolled back OS patches, changed configurations, and yelled and debated. As a larger IT shop we have procedures for vetting patches and system changes and frankly, if any of those changes caused this error all of our processes and procedures would be for nil. Extraordinarily frustrating.
