You know what's terrible? This could almost be any one of about three of the Perl contracts I've had in the last decade (apart from the US part, obvs.)
Yeah, the more I dig around how perl shops work, this seems endemic.
Now, I work in a heterogenous Windows/Linux shop with non-paleo hardware. We're even deploying on AWS in a limited fashion.
This place has its warts too, but everywhere has something. But that previous place... I'm surprised it still hasn't crashed and burned. Their networking was solid tho. Just anything with Linux was a tire-fire.
And as one more gem, there was a program that terrified the fuck out of me. A fellow engineer showed me this update tool that would update a router remotely. Great. Well, if you add the -n (customer) flag with the customer number, it would update all the routers for that customer!
It was spectacular, and terrifying at the same time. I asked them for their testing procedure, and it was a -t (customer-testing). If they forgot the -testing, well.....
