Implementation of SWIFT 7 for the production server of abank among our clients here in the Philippines is scheduled first weekend ofFebruary this year.
SWIFT, which standsfor Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, is anapplication use for exchange of financial messaging transactions of all banksworldwide.
My teammate and I reached their head office at around 8o’clock in the evening although our time to arrive there should at least be7:30, being all transactions of the application they use are all processed andalready done.
Upon reaching the site, we have to wait for the call of theTreasury Operations Division (TOD) / Foreign Operations Division (FOD), forconfirmation that we can already put off the machine with which we will have totake some data back-ups necessary for the migration of their application. It’salready 9:00PM but phone is still silent. It is then that Sir Charles, Head ofthe IT Support Division, decided to personally go to the TOD/FOD, but to hissurprise nobody is already there. All employees of said division already wenthome.
Sir Charles then gave us the go signal to stop their runningapplication, the SWIFT 6.3 software including some other Services like AllianceAccess, SwiftnetLink, Gateway, et. al. To make sure everything will be migratedfrom version 6.3 to 7.0 we checked every requirements if they were able to meetthem. The new production server machine is already fine having met the minimumhardware we require, at most 64bit compliant. The operating system as Windows2008 Server R2 with SP1 64 bit ready, user profiles, firewalls, anti-virus, ipaddress for the corporate LAN connectivity and swiftnet connectivity, routingtable configurations, system time synchronization and other software matters andsettings/configurations are carefully checked.
Test for passwords for Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), login of Admin user for Access, Gateway and the like are available too. Howeverthe test for passwords for their Hardware Security Module (HSM) Boxes failed.So we have to reset them using hyperterminal application, recovery password,Pin Entry Device (PED) Keys and additional serial cables. The print out fortheir SWIFT 7 licenses are also missing so we have to download them again via
www.swift.com with the Security Officer aslogin user.
As part of the requirement to take back-up files allmessages left in their oracle database should have been completed also. Bydefault, messages remain live if either message partners holding them areeither disabled or printers attached are put off. We are not authorized tomanually complete said messages so we decided not to touch it meantime so as wecan already proceed with what we can do and will just later archived andback-up them as soon as the in-charge for said will arrive next morning, asthey are also scheduled to have some test and final walk through for the newapplication.
It’s almost 4:00 AM in the morning when we are finally donewith our installation/migration for SwiftNet Link (SNL), Alliance Gateway(SAG), Alliance WebStation (SAB), Alliance Access (SAA), Alliance Workstation(SAW), Alliance Webplatform (SWP) and so with their patches. Configuration forthe Application Interfaces, System Administration, Standards as well as ValueAdded Services and others are also finished.
At 5:00 AM we decided to have a short nap because theactivity for user’s testing and final walkthrough will still resume at 9:00AM.At 7:00AM I already woke up and take a bath. While waiting for my othercompanion I managed to access my mail and read some news through yahoo.com.
We were again at the bank’s premises at around 9:30AM. Theuser’s find some technical errors to put up the old application with the oldserver so we took time to isolate it again. There were so many issues discussedfor the old application which took us at least half day to consider theirqueries. At 1:00PM we then finally put up the new server.
After series of testing, e.g, loopback sending of message,File Transfer Application (FTA), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Printer Tests,User Log-in and others are done, users affirmed the application is ready toreplace the old one.
The activity is so tiring but it’s all worth it. Hope tofinish all projects before end of March. =)
