What, no version control?

$WEB_CORP has taken on the maintenance contract of a particular site and the client has asked for some changes to be made along with fixing up some SQL injection vulnerabilities.

My first step was to GET all the site’s scripts via FTP so I could create a local DEV instance of it and was surprised to see the following:

$ ls -1 index*.asp index-old.asp index.11May2007.asp index.11Oct2006.asp index.13March2006.asp index.18aug2006.asp index.20Feb2007.asp index.20Jan2006.asp index.21Aug2006.asp index.24April2007.asp index.24Feb2006.asp index.25April07.asp index.29Nov2006.asp index.3Feb2006.asp index.3march2006.asp index.5July2006.asp index.5fEB2007.asp index.6Oct2006.asp index.7April2006.asp index.8Feb2007.asp index.asp index2.asp indexBAK.asp indextemp.asp

Ouch!

I big part of my last gig at $BIG_CORP was environment management. It was frequently tedious work but it instilled in me the importance of separating the development/integration, testing and production instances of your applications so it saddens me to see the PROD environment of this site in such disarray. The above is possibly a disaster waiting to happen.

Thankfully my own applications reside within a version control system and I don’t rely on backing up and tracking old versions of files before a new release.

That’s my rant over. I’ve dumped the database and bunged it’s contents into the server running on my VirtualBox VM, now all that’s left is getting IIS working…