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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">About 8 years ago, I started working for a large Energy
company in the UK – InitrodeUK, let’s say. After a few months of working on
this and that I was given a project of my own, in conjunction with a rather good
Business Analyst, Ayesha. InitrodeUK were building their first Wind Farm (at
the other end of the country) and needed some IT support. This was a £750M to
£1B project.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">The Wind Farm was in a field in the middle of nowhere; it
had a Web Server on site running the SCADA (System Control and Data
Acquisition) system, serving up instantaneous readings of all sorts via a
fairly pretty set of Web Pages. Ayesha had managed to get this connected to the
Internet via a Satellite broadband provider, and the users had a stand-alone PC
with a modem which they used to look at it.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">My job: get data out of it, average various readings for
last 10 minutes and store the results in a database and email them to a 3rd
party Forecasting company. Every 30 minutes the Forecasting company would email
or FTP us their energy production forecast for the next 72 hours. This would be
stored in the database, where later actual metered production would also be
stored and various finance etc reports generated.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font face="Calibri"><font size="3">The company who actually built the Wind Farm and provided
the SCADA system didn’t have any way to get the data out except via the web
pages: OK, HTML scraping (ugh) coming up! Still how can I contact the web
server? Ayesha and I go to the Network team and explain what we need: can they
open a VPN for us? And how about FTP for the forecasts from the 3</font><font size="2">rd</font><font size="3">
party?<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">After cleaning ourselves up and applying a few bandages we
started thinking laterally.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">We commandeered the stand-alone PC from the users and put it
on my desk. I developed my scraper and it tested out OK. We set up a free email
account with someone (Freeola?) – I set the name part to simon.smith and got
Ayesha to select the domain from the available list: lovenest.co.uk - thanks,
Ayesha!<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Now for the other side: no FPT, but can I have a corporate
email address assigned for the emails from the SCADA scraper and the Forecaster? Nope: there needs to be a real person behind it and
there wouldn’t be, just a service account and policy yadda yadda yadda.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">However: we had a server! It was dedicated to this job
(£750M had some affect)! I had Admin
Access! It was going to be promoted to production! I had it reading email from
my account using a freebie MAPI library I’d found on the Internet. Oh well, we
could just keep that going…<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Nope. The MAPI library was rejected and forbidden for some
reason I never understood. I ended up installing Outlook on the server.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Everything was ready on time and it went live successfully.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">However, the stand alone PC was still on my desk and I
couldn’t get anyone else to take it – not a server so not allowed in the data
centre’s and so on. There was the Satellite router, with the PC on top of it and
the screen on top of that, with the keyboard in front of the router, reaching
just to the edge of the desk. Turns out that router power switch was just the
right height to be pushed by the keyboard. And it turns out that if I got up in
just the right way my chair would hit the keyboard. This generally only
happened when I reached under the desk as I got up, such as when picking up my
stuff because I was going home. There were a few weekends when no data was
collected at all…but the Forecasts still came in and seemed alright to the
users….<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Then the Wind Farm had a power cut and SCADA system went
down (not powered by the Wind Farm!). We had to fly someone up there to turn it
on again. He arrived with a UPS from PC World and left it there. However, there
was another problem: it turned out that there was another system supplying data
via the Web server to another location in InitrodeUK: it went into a system
located in one of our Power Stations, and that didn’t come back when it was turned
on again. Eventually we worked out that the Power Station Firewall was blocking
it because when it came up the Satellite ISP gave it a new IP address. Seems that power cuts were quite frequent and while the UPS brought the system up again, the ISP would change the IP; the techs at the Power Station had to look at
their Firewall records to see who was being rejected and try to give them
access to see if it was the SCADA system.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">Eventually, the Satellite ISP went out of business. When we
got Internet access again, I added a modem to my desk, and started a 15-month
long phone call.<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<font size="3"><font face="Calibri">That was a while ago; we have a few more Wind Farms now and they
are managed far more sensibly!<o:p></o:p></font></font>
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<o:p><font face="Calibri" size="3"> </font></o:p>
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