alt Hacker NewsOne of the Ohio Secretary of State's "certified" (wrong terminology, but you get the idea) voter registration databases used by various county Boards of Elections is written in VFP. The software maintains the list of voters, their addresses, and scans of signatures.
Recently it had TOTP 'MFA' added to comply with a Secretary of State mandate.
Anyone who uses the software can just open the database files directly. They're just DBF files in a shared folder on a file server. All the users have to have read/write access to the files or the application won't work.
I hang my head.
Replies
seen this exact pattern in small business FoxPro setups too, DBFs on a share are one dropped SMB connection away from a corrupted index. if you're stuck maintaining something like this the least bad move is nightly copies of the whole folder to a second box, and actually opening that copy in the app now and then instead of just checking that the file sizes match.
Sounds like it works as designed.