Why the NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators 251
An anonymous reader writes "Curious about the recently purposed NSA cuts, Courtney Nash explores a few myths about systems automation 'In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to "improve security." So far, I've mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn't add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.'"
We know nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Since "anonymous reader" isn't in a position to know anything about how the NSA's systems are set up, what these administrators exactly do, who has/needs administrator privileges vs. who could do their jobs with reduced privileges, etc., etc., then isn't this discussion even more of a waste of time than usual on slashdot?
Re:replace Windoze with Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
That's one way to reduce the number of sysadmins effectively.
I don't think that's true in an enterprise environment with thousands of servers.
In my experience, it takes a larger installation to justify the team size for a well run Windows Server installation (to administer all of the Microsoft System Center [wikipedia.org] components (SCCM, SCOM, etc)), but once that investment in management tool configuration is done, then administering large numbers of Windows Servers doesn't really take more people than administering large numbers of Linux servers. LIke most MS Enterprise products, the MSC components can be complicated to configure and take a certain amount of dedicated resource to configure and use them well.
The same scalability may not hold true once you get to Google Scale with a million servers to manage, since at that point you can justify spending a lot more resource on writing custom management and support tools even down to customizing kernels if you want to.
In a small shop where you may have a few dozen servers, then you may find the MSC tools to be overkill and not worth the effort to set them up well so Linux can be simpler and easier to administer.
Laying off Americans, hiring Bangladeshi ? (Score:1, Interesting)
Perhaps NSA is not kidding
Perhaps they will just go ahead and lay off 90% of their admins, who are American citizens
And then, they will hire admins from Bangladesh as replacement
NSA doesn't need to be troubled by admins who are American citizens who understand the concept of Liberty, Human Rights, and Democracy - they can hire replacement admins from 4th world countries where nobody cares about any of those "Western Luxuries"
Re:replace Windoze with Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Another way is to completely scrap the computer systems and go back to paper. It is a lot harder to get a hold of 500,000 classified documents and walk out of the office with them. I think it'd get flagged if Mr. Manning all of a sudden was at the photo copier 24x7 for a few weeks.