There's a NetApp for that

PRIO-1! PRIO-0! THE SKY IS FALLING! WE'RE DOOMED!! HAAAALLLP!!!

What a way to start the day. A quick look showed Srini works for $BigInterwebs who are still in development. You can't have a Prio-1 if you're in development, and if you want 'round the clock support, $MegaCorp makes you pay extra for it. So I don't feel too bad that it was almost lunch before I even see just the tip of this iceberg.

Reading through the problem, it was going to be after lunch before I answered it. The puppy needed feeds and it's marked Prio-3 (because that's what it is).

I'm not being as much of a dick as it seems. Srini is in California; his day starts after mine is well over, and thank fuck for that because it means he's unlikely to ever get up early enough to try calling me. Copypasta continues:

$YourBigApp %datastore% param has a limit of 255 char length since we are limited with 4 filesystem folders in our Production Environment so unable to include additional folders.Please let us know below are there any available options!!

1. Reference a config file to maintain this param value or any enhancement in future.
2. Any alternative to specify a way to store more folder names

A field length of 256 characters for the directory list should be able to allow even the least creative out there to specify at least 10 sub-directory location. And since one subdirectory can safely hold around 2.1 billion (~2³¹), it's going to be a special challenge to run out of room anytime soon. And I told him so, even explaining how to map and rename in a network-neutral sort of way.

And that was Srini taken care of. If only some of these other tickets were as easy.

This morning I logged in and the IM went nuts, popping up windows from four different mooks at Central who had tried to ping me about some ticket. There were more than a dozen mails all referring to the same damned ticket number. It dawned on me that I hadn't finished building a repro yesterday and this weird international sorting problem was a big deal for $EuroTelco...

And then I saw which company had the ticket number:

Escalate!! make the priority to 2!!

We have a limitation on the filer provided NetApp storage which can accomdate 91k files per folder but our environment creates around 40K files per day since we have trasncripts,email and other attachments. This is the defect..

You have NetApp storage? Which we don't support. Which we told you {clicky-clickety-click} a whole month ago we don't support. And you went and got it anyway even though it's unnecessary, a burden on our system, causes you a performance hit, and it can't hold more than two days' worth of your files in a directory?

Had you listed to us in the first place you'd have saved time and money and aggro and you'd have a system which, based on your stated fill rate of 41K docs a day, would be able to hold no fewer than 2004 years' worth of files.

Root Cause:17 - Fuckwit.
We already told you this shit but yeah, what do we know?