White House CIO Describes His 'Worst Day' Ever 333
dcblogs writes "In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers."
Love it (Score:2)
TFA indicates clearly not only that there's no urgent need for IT geeks to unionize, but also what havoc they could wreak if they ever did.
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My union covers our IT personnel (I am chair of the union's IT committee).
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Awesome. Hope to Möbius you guys never think of accepting contracts from rival companies on the side.
Re:Love it (Score:4, Informative)
Please stop perpetuating the lie that union workers are "unfireable". Unions do not protect workers from being fired for gross incompetence, theft, sabotage, and so forth. What they DO give you is the right to 'progressive discipline', where you can't be fired for wearing the wrong color shirt or being two minutes late for your shift, without a hearing with a union representative advocating for your interests.
Until American workers enjoy some of the protections of their European counterparts (even if limited to being required to provide a REASON for a termination - employers in 'at will' states can fire you and say to your face "we're not going to tell you why"), then unions will be necessary in this country.
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Thank you. BTW, that's not a slur. Why is it a badge of honor to some people to be as spineless as possible?
No surprise (Score:3, Insightful)
They inherited a system that "lost" months/years worth of emails during the Bush administration. Of course it all sucked, it was designed to.
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Big surprise. The contract (like all government contracts) went to the lowest bidder and they surely cut corners.
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You say this as if it is stupid, when surely you know it is the faux outrage from taxpayers that causes this shit.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course it all sucked, it was designed to.
It wasn't originally designed to suck, but when you refuse to spend money on infrastructure improvements,
you end up spending your time putting out fires instead of making improvements.
This applies equally to computer hardware/networks as it does to our highway/bridge, electrical, and water infrastructures.
FFS, there are critical metal pipes in DC's water distribution network that date back 150 years to Lincoln.
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It wasn't originally designed to suck, but when you refuse to spend money on infrastructure improvements, you end up spending your time putting out fires instead of making improvements.
Ding ding ding!!!!
I think in Slashdotspeak, I should say "^This", and HARD.
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It's not that they refused, but it's a typical government problem. You think corporations have budget problems wait until you see the government. Everything is cut to bone. If it still works then there's no reason to upgrade, and if it doesn't work well maybe you can share with someone. Even if it might cost more to maintain, that's a person cost and not a capital expenditure.
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Just a tip, if you ever want people (outside of a small echochamber) to take you seriously, you may want to grow up and stop referring to GW Bush as "Dubyah"-- its about as mature as calling Microsoft M$, or someone you dont like a doo-doo head.
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You tell him Lord Lamecat.
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he country was in the middle of a war and their party groomed no leader to continue it.
Still the case
Which side had 6 years of uncontested control?
Neither
Which side failed to run a ship that could endure the storm?
Both
Re:No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Well and as I have learned the hard way lately, if it's going to cost 500k per year to run IT for a couple of hundred employee outfit when it's government money, someone will complain. When I did private sector stuff the biggest issue was downtime, a million dollars, no problem if that means good uptime. I used to go into insurance companies and banks at 4pm, the regular staff left at 5 -5:30, if it wasn't ready to go the next day by 8 or 9am you were in seriously trouble. In government it's all about how much money they have to explain to some jackass who wants to make political hay out of it.
The way I count it from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/opinions/graphics/2006stafflistsalary.html the white house has about 400 employees. Figure 350k a year in desktop computers alone, for IT staff, another couple of hundred K in 'mobile' and accessory devices, ancillary office equipment you could easily be looking at 1.5 million or for just the non classified IT stuff. That isn't, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of money, but you have to know that whomever isn't in charge is going to want to curtail that spending, because it's 'wasteful'.
(how you count IT spending can vary wildly. When you're up into that many people you have a lot of dedicated IT staff in various sub groups who may or may not count towards the total and so on). On top of the mess that would be trying to deal with 400 spoiled brats who want everything their way (I'm sorry, executives who want to maximize their productivity), you have to try and plug into everything else in government and have the secured computers/networks as well. That isn't cheap.
Appropriate (Score:4, Funny)
Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives ...
Considering the sort of people who are using these machines, it seems almost appropriate somehow.
Maybe keeping them technologically underpowered is actually a good thing. Those crafty, crafty White House IT gurus.
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Besides, in an environment like the White House, I think it's more than just a good idea to keep a few PC's with working floppy drives at hand. Preferably down to 8" drives. Just in case you need to read some long-archived file, that has never been put on a more modern medium.
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What was removed that took out support? I'd think floppy controllers are still supported -- was there something special about those drives vs. current drives?
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Yeah, and the rumor about "Yellow Cake" in Iraq was a fouled up email about what Saddam had with his friends on his Birthday.
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i think you missed the point. recall that a significant portion of slashdot would opt to abolish the federal government entirely.
OMB IT has their hands tied. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well it sounds like a CIO to manage and streamline the procurement process is what is needed and well overdue. Obama did the right thing as past presidents were old and out to lunch in terms of technology.
If they need to check for spyware crap and security then set a budget with interns providing the wiping of the hard drives 7 times with an IT department to provide the encryption and come up with procedures to retire and fix PCS and so on.
I would think a job as important as the executive branch would be im
You get what you pay for (Score:3)
Too bad we probably paid billions for such crappy infra.
Re:You get what you pay for (Score:5, Insightful)
If a system is end of life and dies can you say it was too bad or crappy without knowing how long it was kept running?
Everything has a shelf life and must be either upgraded or replaced eventually. Even the Large Hadron Collider is nothing more than a replacement of the Large Electron–Positron Collider before it which reached the end of its useful life. I had a similar discussion with an engineer at the industrial plant I work it. We have a vibration monitoring system which died and needed replacing, and he also called the system "crap." For some perspective the system was obsolete in 1995. The two subsequent models are now also obsolete yet this thing has been humming away just fine for 17 after the vendor stopped supporting it.
Yet someone called it crap.
Floppy Drives! (Score:2, Funny)
That's madness! Everyone knows that the floppy drive dictates the speed, quality, and age of the computer!
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Yeah, it seems to me most Windows computers up until very recently came with floppy drives by default.
Having a floppy drive is not an indication that a computer is out of date - unless that's the only drive type the computer has.
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Yeah, it seems to me most Windows computers up until very recently came with floppy drives by default.
Whats a floppy drive?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_drive [wikipedia.org]
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I want to say most vendors stopped shipping with floppy drives by default around 2003. Presumably there was a hardware refresh between 2003 and 2009. It seems likely, then, that the inclusion of the floppy means that the IT person specifically included floppies.
The alternative--that there wasn't a refresh between 2003 and 2009--is, in fact, a bit sad. Six years is a pretty long time for computers, and their value increased considerably throughout last decade.
An interested person could probably file a FOIA
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They've been obsolete for years.
From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
In February 2003, Dell announced floppy drives would no longer be pre-installed on Dell Dimension home computers, although still available as a selectable option and purchasable as an aftermarket OEM add-on. On 29 January 2007, PC World stated that only 2% of the computers they sold contained built-in floppy disk drives; once present stocks were exhausted, no more standard floppies would be sold. In 2009, Hewlett-Packard stopped supplying standard floppy drives on business desktops.
Re:Floppy Drives! (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, perspective is called for - Obama took the White House in 2009, up until 2009 HP had floppy drives STANDARD on business desktops - so as Obama took the White House, HP was still shipping floppy drives as STANDARD.
Yes, sitting in 2012 we can all agree that floppy drives have been obsolete for years, but in 2009 HP was still shipping them as standard.
The note about Dell Dimensions is nice, but those are "home" computers, not "professional".
And that 6 year-old software? I can guarantee you it was Office 2003 - sure, as Bush was preparing to leave office his staff certainly could have gone around and upgraded everyone to the latest/greatest version of office (Office 2007), but it is now 2012, and the latest version of Office on PCs is 2010 - does that have 100% market penetration, or are there a few stragglers on 2007 or even 2003?
Maybe, like most office users at the time, the Bush White House wasn't a big fan of the ribbon interface introduced in Office 2007 [wikipedia.org]
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Yes, sitting in 2012 we can all agree that floppy drives have been obsolete for years, but in 2009 HP was still shipping them as standard.
Not quite. In 2009, HP stopped offering standard floppy drives as an option. The Wikipedia article didn't say when they stopped including them as a standard feature.
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The note about Dell Dimensions is nice, but those are "home" computers, not "professional".
WTF is the difference between a "home" computer and a "professional" one? If anything, I'd expect home computers to be more powerful since professionals don't generally need to play the latest games...
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Desktops maybe. Laptops though... I don't think I've seen a floppy drive standard on a laptop since the early 2000's.
'first presidential Blackberry' (Score:2)
Perhaps also known as the last presidential Blackberry. [vancouversun.com] Of course, parts of the government still favor Blackberry [570news.com], but then apparently parts still like floppy drives too. With the recent /. posts on DOD Androids (not the kind that lead to Skynet comments) and the like, one wonders how much longer even this will last.
As a former employee, I can only confirm (Score:2, Funny)
The equipment of some government agencies I have worked for is kind of prehistoric. I you are using Windows 95 as a file server, you are in serious trouble.
what if... (Score:2)
Similar situation... (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently took over for a staff which had been interned in their positions for the better part of a decade. Out with the old in-house staff, in with the new outsourced IT 'team'.
I can easily see how this happens, outside procurement and ineptitude problems on the part of the previous WH IT staff. When you've got what amounts to 'institutional knowledge death', with the institution carrying on, you've got to over-staff for some time or things fall apart completely while you play catch up. With a situation where you don't understand it all, are under staffed or under skilled, you're faced with only a couple options when you come in behind the curve, with aging equipment and software: you either start replacing everything you can, as you are able, as quick as you can, or you start suffering outages. It's even worse if things are mismanaged and things are failing all around you.
As for the claims of the article? Meh. I'm actually not that impressed by his claims to the poitn where I think 'this is bad':
In 2008, "floppy drives" weren't all that uncommon. I remember servicing Core machines which had floppy drives, still. We're not talking biege boxes with ISA slots here, necessarily - with a 4 year replacement schedule for desktops, floppy drives don't speak of ineptitude.
The 80-hour-week thing means nothing. It might mean he was understaffed, or that he's a workaholic. To me, it sounds like the meaningless words of a political appointee.
"Over 82% of the White House technology had reached end of life" means nothing. If they were on a 3-year replacement schedule for desktops and they had 10/100 switching, I can easily see where you'd come to that number.
He had one "data center", with no redundancy. A bit of a contradiction, yeah? This is made somewhat less impressive by the fact that this administration, in particular, was a bunch of Nancys when they came in with "oh woes, look at this mess", quite obviously overstating things for dramatic media effect.
"Our email servers went down for 21 hours" isn't a statement of disaster, it's a statement of ineptitude. If they got the mail servers back up, with the data intact, the problem wasn't with the environment but the people involved (or the lack of staffing). His BB starting to have mail incoming suggests a reinstall wasn't required, so safe to say BES was OK, so who knows what the real 'problem' was which caused a day of outage...
Sorry, I've got a very thin skin when it comes to management making any sort of technical claim. They're usually about 50% lie, and of the remaining 50% truth, only about 1/5th of that is factual with the rest being augmented by misunderstanding, disillusions of grandeur, and over-simplification to pull up the full 100%. Realize that a) this is a political appointee talking, b) it's a seemingly non-technical manager (he's up in his datacenter, lookin' for redundancy!), and c) this is the government we're talking about, after all. Anyone who's had any dealings with them on a technical level realizes that 'setbacks' and 'shortcomings' or 'difficult problems' or the like are (probably!) due to ineptitude. Yes, sadly, even amongst the elite (though not necessarily of their own doing - thank you bureaucratic bullshit).
Granted, this may not have been the case when BO came to the WH and took over. They may have had previous IT staffers who stayed through the transition, but I'm guessing they did not (due to political mistrust issues). It could've been a genuine clusterfuck. Sometimes it's nothing and people cry about the sky falling as they pull down the curtain; sometimes, it really is bad. (If you understand weather patterns, you may recognize a summer storm to not be the disaster that chicken little claims...)
Re:Similar situation... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, I've got a very thin skin when it comes to management making any sort of technical claim. They're usually about 50% lie, and of the remaining 50% truth, only about 1/5th of that is factual with the rest being augmented by misunderstanding, disillusions of grandeur, and over-simplification to pull up the full 100%.
This was the first relevant article kicked up by google:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9142268/_Lost_Bush_e_mail_settlement_requires_that_White_House_reveal_IT_practices_ [computerworld.com]
The e-mail problem began in 2002 and 2003 after the White House moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange. As it moved to the new platform, the President's IT staff also discontinued use of legacy, circa 1994, electronic management and archiving system, called Automated Records Management Systems (ARMS.) Development began on a new archiving system that ran into its own issues and wasn't implemented.
Without an automated archiving system, the White House relied on manual processes to archive e-mails, and that's when the problems evidently began. Files were mislabeled and commingled on back-up tapes containing all types of information.
The public didn't find out about this for years until federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald disclosed it in 2006 while investigating the outing of Valerie Plame.
The Bush Jr. IT infrastructure was broken from the day they installed it and remained broken for the full 8 years he was in office.
White House IT: thumbs down (Score:4, Insightful)
From what I've read, there's only one firm that does White House transitions. I think it's Bechtel, but it's been so long that I've read anything about transitions that I have around a 15% confidence level in that piece of data.
Google "white house transition" and you'll see that it's a total mess. If you want to read about it, there's info here:
http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/ [whitehouse...roject.org]
From what little I've read, you basically get a mostly empty building (the White House). It's up to the team to build/rebuild the infrastructure...but as any operations person knows, IT infrastructure is usually way behind everything else. The general executive branch IT has been a low priority for decades. What's more important, email or setting up the phone so the president can call someone (or someone can call the president)?
At that point, the team is probably so far behind that they're screwed continuously for the one or two terms.
Are the guys running the systems any good? I'd ask you: how many of you could pass a background and attitude check? You think the process etc at your workplace is bad, imagine how bad it is in the Executive branch.
That said, it might be fun...but it's probably a nightmare. "I can't print out this $15 billion dollar appropriation because the f*cking printer doesn't work!" "People in PA are starving because the email server ate all of our emails!"
Every minute is a crisis, with everyone breathing down your neck 24/7. Does that sound like something you'd want to do for 24/7/365/4 years?
What do computers do again? (Score:2)
The intern convinced Colangelo that there was a great need for automation.
WTF did he think computers were for before that little piece of enlightenment hit him?
I really hope that was just some random idiot fluff from author of TFA and not an actual sentiment from someone with "Information" in their job title.
Emanuel end at the White House (Score:2)
"Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago."
Rahm Emanuel has few redeeming virtues and deserved that fitting computer he got. He too had reached his end that the White House, no too soon enough, however. Floppy, Rahm? Memory? Nah...
At least... (Score:2)
At least all the keyboards still had the "W" key [nytimes.com]!
More a problem of decade than of age (Score:2)
Apparently their systems are from the 1990s which was, in retrospect, the worst decade to buy any kind of IT equipment. Imagine they had some Unix system with VT100 terminals. This would have given them an easy upgrade path. They could have made simple and secure ways to remotely login, plus they could have simply replaced the system with a more modern Linux system, etc...
So, I'm guessing... (Score:2)
""In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief o
Do you Yahoo (Score:2)
They should follow the example of Sarah Palin and use Yahoo Mail.
I can picture Kim Jong-un calling the helpdesk: "please add leaderofthefreeworld61@yahoo.com on my trusted recipients list, we almost initiated a nuclear holocaust because I missed an important message in my junk mail folder".
Your next worst day will be... (Score:2)
Here's the real story first hand (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is partially correct but leaves out the actual technical issues involved.
Someone *from* that Datacenter here at that time. Here's what really happened.
The old administration did not care about the existing IT infrastructure because they were on their way out. They wanted no changes made- just that things be left up. Yes the email system was old and past EOL, but the outages were really the perfect storm of everything that could hit the fan actually hitting the fan at the same time.
The facility was doing work on the power system- the UPS to be specific. Somewhere along the line they messed up, and cut the power. *All* of the power. Datacenter goes dark. They brought the power back up, but then tripped it again before bringing it up for good. This detail is what caused the weekend of hell.
The SAN that the clustered email servers (yes, clustered, they *were* redundant) had the stores on was an EMC Symmetrix. It has a built-in battery backup system so that if the SAN looses power it has enough stored to flush the cache to disk. The power going off started this process. The power going back on triggered the response to stop flushing the cache and start checking and rebuilding. Then the power went off again. This is the part where the specific details get hazy but in effect the SAN did not like this. I don't believe it had enough power to totally flush the cache and/or it did not have the logic built in to handle an outage while in recovery mode. The result was a downed SAN that *would not come back up*. Now all of the data was down and nothing could be done but wait for the vendor to show up and try to fix it.
At the same time we were dealing with *every* server being off and having to come back up. There were hundreds. Luckily most did. Some did not. Some were important, such as in the case of *both* the servers in a clustered system that would not boot- which just so happened to be the system that some of the say "more important" VIPs were on. These were old systems running Exchange 2000 on Windows 2000. Long past due, but kept up by the staff since the EOP would not approve a new email infrastructure.
Eventually the systems would be restored and everything would be back on-line. In the meantime though Brook thought it would be a good idea to spend untold amounts of money to bring in MS Engineers to look things. They cost a lot of money and made a bunch of reports but they didn't fix a damn thing. The staff that was already there found the issues with the servers and fixed them.
There were later headaches, such as when mentioned that the Sonnet was cut (thanks Verizon!) and further SAN maintenance but that was the weekend from hell.
Things to note:
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The DOD still standardizes on IE 6 from what I am told.
It is not cutting edge at all.
Obama's staff at least did a WTF and quickly hired the first CIO to clear the red tape. True he was not a good CIO, but someone was needed. It is unacceptable to have email down PERIOD at such an important job. The president's job is the most important in the world and any loss of email or downtime when WW3 starts or something unrelated is unacceptable. In the private sector downtime is measured by costs with employees sala
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Consider other people his age in that year. 2/3 of them didn't USE email. Many of us had parent that were that age at that time and know what it's like dealing with "old people that refuse to move out of the stone age".
It would not surprise me in the least to hear that Bush1 (or Bush2 for that matter) never opened email, ever, and got his information on dead tree and in meetings. "Email's down? is that bad?"
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I do not believe the Oval Office has had a computer installed in i [gizmodo.com]t. Ever. If I'm not mistaken it is an even bigger deal than the Presidential Blackberry - it could be argued that every page POTUS surfed would be recorded and archived forever...
Do you really want your President to sit around wondering why his browser is frozen?
Re:Indication of Government Ability? (Score:5, Funny)
The DOD still standardizes on IE 6 from what I am told.
The different services have their own IT departments; they even have their own networks, NIPR and SIPR are just two of many. Not sure about the DOD proper, but even the Army is phasing out IE 6 and XP. I'm pretty sure the Air Force and Navy are mostly on Win 7, and the Marines got some new brightly colored rocks with sparkly beads.
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Re:Indication of Government Ability? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh SHUT up.
The reason government can't get anything done, generally, is there's always some jackass out there questioning whether a thing is needed because it happens not to be exactly what they want, or why workers cost anything at all since their life is in the shitter so why should a government employee make money either?
There is a significant interest in this country in starving government, and then mocking it for under-performing. That's a combination of arguments only an imbecile would make.
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Turn off the projector, son.
Nobody of any consequence in the Democratic Party has said that Capitalism has failed in general. Parts of the organizations that make up the model have certainly failed, but capitalism as a concept and economic model works fine provided everyone plays fairly.
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What's your point? Banking is a complicated industry, made more complicated every year by greedheads who want to separate the people who do actual work from their money as shadily as possible, so it can't come back to bite them. The current financial situation the country finds itself in is nearly directly attributable to a lack of oversight. I'm not in favor of regulation for its own sake, but for goodness' sake, let's not also have lack of regulation for its own sake.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Insightful)
23% down sounds about average for MSExchange servers.
Only on slashdot could such ignorance get modded up.
On a bad bad day as a consultant, I have to fix scenarios with Exchange where everything blew up and theyre down for a single day-- MAYBE 2-- out of several years uptime.
Thats with the clients who have no full time IT staff whatsoever and a shoestring budget.
Possibly if you have no idea what youre doing, or dont know anything about exchange, then yea 23% might be an OK guess.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Insightful)
You miss the fact that he INHERITED that system. That's how politics works. The lame duck guy in charge of the White House (which would be the former President DIRECTLY) let the thing rot...
Part can be attributed to the old staff being done with the position and the new guy will just buy new stuff anyway... Almost fair?
Part of all the downtime was a FEATURE that the pervious administration used to their full advantage... They were über controll freaks... Controlling information of their own "trusted" employees was part of D.C.'s daily routine. The rot was deliberate to stop communications from being added to the archives.
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I agree, I think that nothing prevented the former administration from getting decent hardware. If they lived with a broken system they wanted it. The new guy should have taken it all, put in a room sealed it and never thought about it again, IMHO, for the same reason.
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You miss the fact that he INHERITED that system. That's how politics works.
Oh, you mean like when Dubbya showed up, and all the W keys were missing from the keyboards...
http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,619013,00.html [people.com]
Except that the GAO investigated and decided that there wasn't enough evidence to prove any of the "missing W' allegations. I did like the "office of strategery" sign though.
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23% down sounds about average for MSExchange servers.
Only on slashdot could such ignorance get modded up.
And only on slashdot could someone WOOOOSH so bad... it was modded up FUNNY.
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Workers are workers.... government or private.
Can't get more human than human and we are all the same animal.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Informative)
Zimbra. The enterprise version also has ActiveSync support.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:4, Insightful)
in my experience, Zimbra is a bloated pig with its share of availability problems as well. I hate the whole "let's take a bunch of open source pieces but just throw them together as an inflexible blob of crap in /opt" approach. The installer leaves a lot to be desired as well, with key components around setting proper permissions resulting in an install that will never work until you manually fix it.
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Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Funny)
This is completely out of the question. Unless the email server also includes file sharing, calendaring, a contact database, all supporting multiple group and individual access rights, it simply can't be used for email.
And the product name must include "Windows" or "Live" in the title, preferably both. And if it can be configured to only support Windows machines, we'll pay double.
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Youre free to pretend we still live in a day where it is unnecessary to do group scheduling through email, but you would be wrong.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Insightful)
Group scheduling and email are different applications. Combining them in one backend is shortsighted.
True, but Exchange isn't an "email" application--it is a group productivity application that includes email, group calendaring and scheduling, tasks, and collaboration.
I understand there are MS haters who will bash Exchange relentlessly, with any label on it, but let's try to be even a tiny bit accurate. Exchange isn't an "email" service and hasn't been exclusively that for nearly 15 years: Time to come up with some new criticisms, the old ones don't apply.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, businesses haven't wanted an email service for nearly 15 years.
They want the group productivity application. But they don't call it that because the most visible part - the part they really see - is the email.
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The "no true email client" fallacy I see. Whatever it is that Exchange does, I don't want it.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, unfortunately, Exchange works very well for many businesses, and it's providing something that they need. You may ask, why do you want to combine scheduling and email into the same application and back-end?
The answer is obvious to people who've used Exchange. You send meeting invites through email. When you're sending the invite through email, your email application can also tell you whether the intended recipients are already busy. You can also schedule resources (e.g. a conference room or projector) and view availability while creating your email invitation.
And why include contacts? Well that, I'd hope, is obvious. All email applications keep a contact list anyway, since they need to store email addresses. If you want to create a contact database that includes email addresses, you may as well include that in the email application.
Tasks? Well, for many of us, our task list comes straight out of email. I get an email, and I need to create tasks for what I'm going to do in response. Plus, "tasks" and "calendars" are logically linked together as tools for effective task-management.
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Exchange isn't an "email" service and hasn't been exclusively that for nearly 15 years
I think that's what most people are complaining about, why have one server doing multiple things? KISS. It should be that those other parts are broken off onto their own servers so that downtime is restricted to each individual part.
First of all, you've proposed using five servers to provide the same services as one server in an effort to "Keep It Simple ..." Do you recognize how ridiculously not-simple such a plan is? You've gone from one server to 4-5 (depending on what features you're using.) How is that "simple?" ...and I have to train my users to utilize a different everything (calendar, email, tasks, contact management, and collaboration) too?
Where do I sign up!
Additionally, Exchange Server now comes with redundancy and fail-over
Re: (Score:2)
Comparing Exchange to Postfix is ridiculous. Exchange can be used as a POP / IMAP server if you really want, and the maintenance goes into the ground.
Of course if you tried to convert to IMAP or POP (whether it be Postfix or Exchange), you would likely be fired when your employer realizes he can no longer use the groupware that was the center of most of his work....
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Informative)
The current White House uses Drupal/OpenAtrium (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/11/ [whitehouse.gov]
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/feb/14/white-house-using-open-atrium/ [developmentseed.org]
www.openatrium.com
For civilians trying to avoid another HBGary-type SQL-injection cascading breach, building a PHP website using the Drupal framework means benefiting from the eyeballs that watch sites like whitehouse.gov, and others. These same eyeballs, and many others contribute their security patches back to drupal.org. Although I imagine their OpenAtrium groupware is behind a firewall.
OpenAtrium is 100% free open-source server software, that reaches out really well to tables and other mobile devices too.
Re: (Score:3)
If it's only send and retrieve mail, I'd suggest postfix & dovecot. If you want the 'fancy' stuff, give Zarafa a try. It's Dutch, so it must be good (vim, python, etc) :P and under the hood it still uses postfix.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft: where "five nines" means 9.9999%.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft: where "five nines" means 9.9999%.
Nah, I think it was more like this:
Gates to Balmer: our Enterprise products need to have 5x9 uptime.
Balmer: ok Boss.
Balmer to VP of Engineering: Bill wants all our products to only work between 5pm and 9am. ...
Re:Not a bad number (Score:4, Interesting)
Gates: We need five nines of uptime
Ballmer: Engineering, we need 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 uptime.
Engineering Manager: Guys, our uptime goal is 45%
Engineering: We already deliver about 72%.
Engineering Manager: Steve, we actually have 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 uptime!
Ballmer: Bill, we're so stable we have 8 nines of uptime! Let's see our competitors beat that!
Gates: Great Steve, let's add some more bloat and see if we can bring that number down some so we leave ourselves with room for improvement.
Re:Not a bad number (Score:5, Funny)
I would like to say that I am absolutely shocked that George W. Bush didn't have a team of IT professionals able to expertly administer the White House technology infrastructure. Given his record of surrounding himself with the best of the best, it's almost impossible to believe.
Re:Floppy... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't understand how adding a peripheral can make the machine "worse"?
The same way that a Mercedes with an attachment on the front to allow it to be pulled by horses isn't as good as one with a normal bumper bar.
Car Analogy, Check. Snideness, Check. Condescension, Check. Now time to get that coffee I deserve...
Re: (Score:3)
It does not per se, but it is a sign that it is an outdated machine.
Re:Floppy... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Floppy... (Score:5, Informative)
If only... None of the HP machines we've bought at work in the past couple of years have had them and we buy both the slimline desktop variety and mini-tower PCs. The few Dells I've seen likewise don't have any floppy ports on the motherboard.
As for build-your-own PCs, or ones from companies that assemble generic parts into PCs, very few come with floppy ports on the motherboard. Indeed, the only non-industrial Intel motherboards I know of that have a floppy port are the ASRock Extreme boards - and that's powered by a SuperIO chip on the motherboard, as chipset support for floppies was dropped by Intel years ago.
Note: the reason I mention all this is because I'm looking at getting a Z77 motherboard in the next few months with a floppy connector, so that I can hook up a 5.25" floppy drive I've acquired (purely for the heck of it, before anyone asks - I've a big box of old disks from the early 90s that I wouldn't mind rummaging through, the PC I used for those having been chucked out years back). ASRock are pretty much the only option nowadays and I have no doubts that when Haswell comes out next year the old 37-pin floppy connector will be well and truly extinct.
Re: (Score:3)
Could be wrong here, but I'm thinking even if you get the drive hooked up you're going to have issues finding a modern BIOS that can support 5.25" disks.
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe my experience is skewed by the fact that the last two PCs I've built have been AMD based. I stand corrected, I just assumed it was a standard part of every IDE controller, and though my current motherboard came with half a dozen SATA ports, I was surprised to see it
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Floppy... (Score:5, Insightful)
Office politics is really no different to real politics, the vast number of people who work for large organisations be they private, public or charitable are for the most part reletively efficient at whatever it is they do, but one or two clowns in the wrong position can turn the whole thing into a circus. In an evolutionary sense large organisations exist because they can do what no man can do alone. However our tribal instincts are still evolving such that we can live with and within groups of more than ~150 that are required to produce what a single mind can imagine, large groups (civilization,cities) simply did not exist until we invented agriculture and yet our current civilization(s) cannot function without them.
For example the multi-national I work for has about 175K people, a death in that "tribe" would happen quite frequently (say one a week), but it's only the handful of people I personally work with that I care (or even know) about. I think the fact that telecommunications have gone from simple morse code to their current star trek capabilities is part of that evolution, we are tool-makers, it's in our nature to invent tools to overcome the problems caused by inventing tools. So in a way that will probably upset bioligists it can be said that our tools and our instincts are co-evolving to accomplish greater feats, but our tools are evolving at a geometrical rate whereas our base instincts evolve at a glacial rate. So I'm betting our tools will evolve to the point where the size of the organisation is (almost) irrelevant to the effectiveness of its internal organisation long before our pumy minds can name, let alone care about, 175k individuals.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Windows 7 runs successfully on Pentium IV hardware. Linux does even better.
I call BS. Pentium IV hardware is typically slower than Atom-based netbooks, and those can only run crippled versions of Win 7 (barely). Modern Linux distros, however, I agree will run fine. I do that every day at work.
Re: (Score:3)
I have to say I got a chuckle when I got to the part about "inheriting" their IT problems. Obama "inherited" all his problems after all!
On day 1, every problem is indeed inherited. This is a fact. A big difference for me is that Obama is actually fixing issues.... especially in the executive branch
Bush's Whitehouse.gov [archive.org]
Obama's Whitehouse.gov [archive.org]
The Obama version is very nice IMHO.
Re: (Score:2)
Let's be clear on one thing - then-Senator Obama went around the country, gave countless speeches, shook innumerable hands, and raised a record amount of campaign contributions [opensecrets.org] to take on these very same problems he now blames the prior administration for... He asked for the job - he didn't draw the short straw [wikipedia.org], and as a sitting U.S. Senator at the time, he was in the bes
Re:I would deploy a Domino cluster (Score:4, Insightful)
I would deploy IBM Domino like in the days of Clinton, which Bush switched to Microsoft Exchange. Reliability went downhill with that decision.
Domino runs cheap and fast and reliable. And has always active clustering so you don't have to deal with downtime. IBM simply has a much longer track record of delivering reliable computing than Microsoft.
People are not replacing Domino with Exchange because it is more reliable. They do it because *everybody* hates Lotus Notes.
This being said, any user that has a complaint against Lotus Notes should be required to work with Groupwise for a week.
Re: (Score:2)
No need to waste taxpayer money with such bloat. Three instances of a Linux server with carefully configured mail server software, and offsite backups maintained over at NSA, should do the job. Hire real techies (with TSC) to maintain it.
Re: (Score:2)
I would deploy IBM Domino
A company I worked at a few years ago used Domino. I thought it was a great proof-of-concept for some future groupware product, but not ready for real-world use. It was broken in so many ways! I saved my list of Domino issues, which I've included below. This is for Domino version 7, so some of these issues may be fixed in subsequent versions. But to be this broken as recently as five years ago (and after 16 years of development, too!) is unforgivable.
So, check out my list of issues, and decide whether