Author: Dave Lewis

Well, unlike our American brothers to the south we here in Canada have Tax deadline looming for April 30th. Normally we (my house) file earlier but, this year life pushed us back.

Today we sat down and worked our way through our tax return in a few short hours. The QuickTax software is actually quite good and keeps me from mounting a bell tower and picking off the neighbours. Kidding of course but, the software is normally not too bad. That is, until I clicked the final button. I was presented with this:

AUGH!

At least it has saved my information (I hope). OK, so it says to log back in and basically try again. Only to be presented with the same error two more times. Finally, this error message:

Maintenance? A euphemism for “Yeah, we got swamped and failed to plan our load accordingly. Oops.”

So much for the third leg of the CIA triad. Availability…no check.

Piss on that.

UPDATE: OK, all taken care of but, for a reason that caused me some confusion. Using Safari and IE6 I was able to login to the QuickTax web application without a problem. But, even now (9:55pm) the “maintenance” alert (I posted a screen cap earlier) still greets me.

UPDATE 2: OK, it looks like I spoke too soon. Now it is failing in Safari. Before it failed it told me that I had to pay out to the government. Now, when I logged into QuickTax with IE it tells me I’m getting a refund. WTF? I haven’t made any changes other that switched browsers!

Well, this doesn’t hold up as a great advertisement for F5. What do I mean? Well, I’m basing this on the cookie that QuickTax dropped in my browser

Name BIGipServerquicktaxweb.2006
Value 00000000000.00000.0000 (actual internal IP address value deleted)
Host 2006.quicktaxweb.ca
Path /
Secure No
Expires At End Of Session

I could be wrong but, somehow I don’t think so. Once I deleted that cookie and reloaded the QuickTax site I was able to log back in. My data now matches what I saw in IE6 but, this too is incorrect. OK, now we can remove the integrity from the CIA triad. Now, I’m really starting to worry about the confidentiality. (Insert deity), I hope the got that part right.

Name QuickTaxWebTestCookie
Value Test
Host 2006.quicktaxweb.ca
Path /secure/
Secure No
Expires At End Of Session

Hmm, in the directory “secure” but, not.

Screw this…I’m using a pencil and paper next year.

Tags: Quick Tax, Canadian Taxes 2006, Tax, Intuit, Income Tax, Canadian Tax