Slashdot Mirror
Which Government Agencies are *nix-Friendly?
payneLess asks: "I have noticed since the Sept. 11 attacks, there is renewed emphasis on beefing up the nation's military, law enforcement and intelligence-gathering capabilities. Presumably, some of the dollars to accomplish this will go to improving their information systems and recruiting quality IT people, which with the slow economy might present some rewarding opportunities. Since I know many .gov and .mil geeks read Slashdot, my question is, besides NASA, are there any agencies that doing cool things with Linux or BSD? Aside from the NSA's security-enhanced Linux project and DARPA throwing a bunch of cash at NAI Labs to develop Trusted BSD, is anybody actually using *nix on a wide scale for day-to-day tasks? One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box and everyone was perfectly content letting the vendors and contractors ram Microsoft, Solaris, and other proprietary stuff down their throats, nor was there any institutional interest in changing over to open source."
Grasping at the public sector straw, are we?
Takahashi Rumiko made beats! DON, taku, DON, taku. . .
Lawrence berkely labs uses unix extensively for simulation. Particle accelerator simulation and weather simulation are huge there. Its running on a nice speedy cray. No Linux tho :)
Most government agencies don't use open source products because they're meant to be used by people who know what they are doing on a computer and the good majority of cracked boxes out there are running Windows. That's certainly not something I'd want to introduce into the corporate element, and definitely not if I was working for the government!
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
But it's Open Source:
The DoD does use StarOffice
It's cross platform, so they can still run Windows, etc. and use it.
I like fire ants. They are very spicy!
I would imagine that many governmental types, particularly in security, would see "open Source" as antithetical to their mission of keeping secrets.
While it may be true that society is better off with full disclosure, this is certainly not our governments attitude about much of anything.
There was this army commander on CNN being interviewed about US capabilities in AF. He said something like "this thing can pinpoint locations, monitor troop movement, traffic triply encrypted both directions..." then he went on "like everything else, they're vulnerable to virus and the sort" HAHAHAHAH!
Mod this up for the AC will ya. True story. someone please confirm!
*nix OSes for a collection of people that have enough trouble keeping Windows boxen secure would be like putting a blind man in charge of watching security cameras to make sure no one is trying to get in. Or putting someone that is quadrapalegic in the position of a life guard...
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
The NLM (part of the National Institutes of Health) uses Solaris extensively. And all the free software available (GNU utils, Perl code, Python code, MySQL, etc.) helps keep taxpayer costs way down.
a mixture of Linux and Windows but with a strong movement towards open source software. See also this story. The German Government nevertheless signed a large contract with Microsoft for future upgrades and deliverables (see here for a German article on that). One of the driving forces behind the open source movement has been the BSI, the german government agency for security in information technology (again Website is in German). They support open standards especially for security sensitive applications.
I've worked with a lot of gov/mil sites as a vendor and they seemed to always have a very mixed bag. The funding goes project by project and the decisions are made that way too it seems. So I'd say there are going to be patches in every branch willing to look at this and patches that would feel threatened by it. Just like anywhere else... =]
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
Every major research division I've seen in the government has some pretty hefty machines running Unix on them. But I can't think of any doing serious work on Linux and only a couple that use a BSD variant. Mostly it's Solaris, TRU-64, HP-UX, VMS, AIX, OS/390, etc- the older rooted and commercial Unices.
I work at a division of the D.O.C., and I will say that we use both Unix and Linux (HP-UX in particular) for all kinds of servers, though most of the desktops (well, not *mine*) are NT/2000.
I've attended two community colelges and one university here in Illinois. All three use a form of *nix (I'm not sure which) to handle logins and email. The CS department of the university, as well, uses Solaris as its OS for higher level C, C++, Java, etc classes.
Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, though I'm not yet sure about the universe. - A Einstein
According to netcraft's September stats 36.53% of the .gov websites were running MS IIS and 31.92% were running Apache, go here for further details. Interestingly there don't appear to be stats for .gov sites prior to last month (it looks like they just started polling .gov sites perhaps? Only 3581 were polled). I wonder what those numbers will look like one year from now.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
The US Army Corps of Engineering,
Engineering Research and Development Center,
Construction Engineering Research Laboratory
(USACERL) used linux in several of its projects during the time I worked there (1996-1998). Linux was used for some workstations, some small networks and the Geographic Resources Analysis Support System (GRASS) software system.
Not a major development, but enough general and specific use to be noticed. I don't know the current status of linux use at the labs today.
The Internet has no garbage collection
The Department of Navy will become even less *nix friendly with the full deployment of the Navy-Marine Core Intranet (NMCI). This initiative is to standarize all desktops, laptops, and servers to one platform, in this case Windows 2000 and both the servers and the desktops, all of it outsourced to EDS. Outside of tasks that require a *nix box, the choice is actually no choice at all: Dell boxes running Windows 2000.
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
Your title says *nix, but you seem to be asking specifically about the libre OSes.
The Air Force Research Labs makes heavy use of Solaris, including Trusted Solaris, for internal routing, firewalling, nameservers, etc. (For external talk-to-the-world connections, more task-specific stuff is used instead; I have no idea what it's called and wouldn't tell it here anyhow.)
Most of the Unix sysadmins have at least one Linux box on the desktop.
Engineers who have to use funky or EOL'd hardware often ask about Linux, both because of the source code availability, and because funky hardware eats up about 97% of their budget.
Does that help, or were you thinking along other lines?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
(Posted anonymously to protect my sorry ass)
The DoD are of split minds on the matter. But this, if you understand the workings of the DoD on matters computing, is nothing new.
From a command perspective, especially for daily work, it's supposed to be a Windows World. However, to really understand things, you have to grasp that policy organizations like Air Staff or AFCA (to use an example from the USAF) typically don't provide funding to back their mandates. That's left ot the command, unit, or installation commander-- it's his people, his money, and generally he can do whatever the hell he wants with it by citing "mission requirements."
Again following a USAF example, AFCA and Air Staff decreed years ago that the desktop would be NT4 + Office97, servers would be NT4 server, yea verily, hail and forever, amen. But there are still many many MANY shops out there still running NetWare (previous standard) and Banyan Vines stuff, not to mention the old mainframes (Sperry, anyone?) that have never been decommissioned, mostly because no one will pony up the dough to recode old applications.
Even now, there's two worlds at work. On the one hand, there is the mandate within the USAF to move to Win2K. But there is ALSO a mandate to take ALL current and future USAF applications and webalize them behind a common middleware layer, moving to a portal-based enterprise operation-- including the use of web-based groupware. It doesn't take a genius to see how at odds these two efforts are.
This is relevant because most government agencies are just like the DoD, just in minature. Many simply follow the Department's lead on tech matters. So you can't really ask which government agencies are *NIX-friendly; you have to ask which communities in government agencies are doing *NIX work.
To which, there is no easy answer. 8)
Create their own? Are you still back in the 60s?
The applications, sure, they write quite a few of those - not a whole heck of a lot of demand for some of the stuff they do. BUT, the name of the game for the last decade has been COTS (Consumer Off-The-Shelf) integration - find things on the market and glue 'em together to do the job the gov't wants done.
They DO like having someone at the other end of a support contract that they can yell at, so the free software world hasn't penetrated as much as it could have, but I can't remember the last time I saw a government-specific OS that wasn't running on government-specific hardware, and those get rarer every day.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
I had a friend who was supposed to be working for/at the NSA on a secure Linux kernel this fall. I don't know anything else about the project, or it's status, but it's clear that the NSA is using *nix.
I'd expect the military to see through "security through obscurity".
I'm not so sure what it is, but the governement agency "GNU" seems to be pretty unix-friendly. I saw their acronym quite a few times. Looks like they've open-sourced their in-house utils or something.
NSA, NOAA, NIH, DOE, etc. are all heavy users of SGI IRIX systems, including some very large (thousand cpu) systems...
It did take a number of years for LLNL to become open to linux as an option. Mostly out of security concerns and support issues.
To find out more about computing at LLNL, check out:
LLNL SCCD
Is this the promised end? Or image of that horror? KING LEAR
Oh...my...*drool* *wipe* *wipe*
Rows of Origin machines churning away...tape rooms with robot arms zipping about faster than you can figure out what they're doing...Linux everywhere you turn...it was heaven. I was dizzy with envy. Alas, they didn't pay enough to make the commute worth it - they're about 45 minutes out on I-55 (non-rush hour) and I like living downtown.
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), part of the US Dept. of Commerce, is very Unix and Linux friendly, especially in the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL).
While the majority of personal PCs used by researchers at NIST are Windows based, Linux and Unix get used for computer modeling applications of all types, and Linux is used quite a bit by ITL. While I was at NIST, there was talk of a standard PC for all of NIST, and the ITL folks were stating that the software should be open-source and not Windows based. I don't know what happened with their request, as I left before the "standard" NIST PC came to be. I suspect though that it was Windows-based so the rest of NIST would not have to learn a bunch of new, basic software.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
You're totally high.
One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box and everyone was perfectly content letting the vendors and contractors ram Microsoft, Solaris, and other proprietary stuff down their throats...
/. person would wish it to be so.
Last I looked Solaris was part of *nix, as were many other "proprietary stuff". If you really mean Linux or BSD then you shouldn't use the term *nix.
To answer what I assume was the original question, perhaps they have considered Linux and xBSD but just haven't found a compelling reason to spend the money to migrate? Free software doesn't necessarily mean cheaper in the short or long term much as the average
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Speaking of "critical" software, I thought I once read somewhere that the two big chip makers didn't make x86 chips that were supposed to be used in critical situations such as hospital life support. Might that also hamper the adoption of the *nixes, since the hardware is harder to come by?
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
Of course the military uses external software. It's my understanding that the Navy has even standardized on NT. I really haven't heard of any branch custom creating OSes that they then widely depoly, though I could be wrong.
If I recall correctly, there was even a notable Navy incident a few years back due to buggy Microsoft software... ah here it is: Navy Smartship "crashes" while running NT.
One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box and everyone was perfectly content letting the vendors and contractors ram Microsoft, Solaris, and other proprietary stuff down their throats, nor was there any institutional interest in changing over to open source.
I wish I was financially able or had enough passion to leave a job because they didn't change over to open source or wouldn't "think outside the box". I'm content to earn a living, knowing that there will be things that I don't like or agree with. I'll save my moral stands for something that matters.
I did a project during college at the National Institute of Health and it seemed to me that 90% of the people there used Macs. I know it is proprietary, but I thought I'd mention it since Macs weren't mentioned in the news.
Ben
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I work for a D.o.D. contractor, and we have been porting a lot of our *nix software over to PC's running Linux.
While Linux isn't used for any critical systems (neither is NT/2000), it is being adopted for many other types of systems (instruction, etc).
We do most of our development on Linux machines, although we are forced to use Windows boxes to do administrative junk (#@$! Outlook!)
I don't know about the inside, but as someone who deals with the NSF from the outside applying for and getting grants, they understand that most academic scientists are using Linux/Unix etc. So they do give pointers for tools for linux to get things into the acceptable formats (TeX, dvi, Postscript, pdf) for submissions and so on. I mostly deal with fastlane their electronic grant submission/reviewing system and it now accepts things in lots of formats, as explained here There was a time a few years ago when they were requiring PDF and the Linux tools for genereating PDF were not mature- I ended up helping tons of people with getting things into the right shape for them by moving stuff over to a Mac, TeXing it there, including all fonts, using Acrobat (blegh) but that was the only reasonable option at the time.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
The Navy's AEGIS system runs on HPUX.
I've had the typical sort of experiences with customs and the DMV. And, the US Postal service has given me a few headaches. But otherwise I'd say that I usually get pretty friendly treatment.
Thanks for asking,
Nix
"One of the reasons I left DoD a few years ago for the private sector was because nobody seemed interested in thinking outside the box"
Since when does the use of open source software equate to "thinking outside the box"? I would think that government agencies have more important criteria for a system than "can we play with the source code?".
If they need some new software, they're not going to hop on over to freshmeat. They're going to decide the function of the software. Then they're going to hire somebody to design a system that accomplishes that exact task. I'm sure there's instances on needing to maintain or upgrade software in the government, but all that means is that they need to be in possession of the source code, the code doesn't need to be sitting on source forge though.
If you did work at the DoD (which I have not), I would think that you'd realize that their use for software is to accomplish a specific task, and it's not for having fun, or sticking it to MS.
BTW, Taco, do you guys have a clapper installed on the db server or what?
Wright Patterson Air Force in Dayton, Ohio runs: SCO, AIX, RedHat, SuSe, and damn near everything thing else.
I had the opportunity to serve with a Field Artillery unit at Fort Hood. They use several fire direction control systems (Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATADS) and others)that are based on Unix. They really wouldn't let me touch it too much to dig around in it, but it looked like Sun. The camoflauging done to make the GUI look like MS Windows was amazing though. To a casual user, it would be difficult to tell that it was not a Windows OS.
from the comp/sci employment page at the NSA (http://nsa.gov/programs/employ/science.html):
It's been said that the systems environment we offer is a veritable fantasyland for computer science, with vast networks that manipulate huge volumes of data and accomplish information analysis at mind-boggling speeds.
Consider acres of hardware
software years ahead of current commercial technology
microprocessor-based advances
over-the-horizon supercomputers
leading-edge activities in programming, signals (including analog control), GUI's, AI, neural nets, information security, the design and implementation of encryption algorithms, and far beyond.
now, if only the headhunters could come up with a pitch like that...
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
How can the post above be "insightful" ? The reliance of both the Navy (see: IT-21 and Admiral Archie Clemins) and the Air Force on Microsoft products (NT, Office, and Exchange) as their standard system is well known and discussed here on Slashdot.
They use QNX for the letter sorting machines, and some optical scanners use Linux Some Vax is also used. some NT is used, for networking, and WebObjects is used for the intranet.
The non essential tasks are done on Windows 95. The supervisors are the lucky ones to use the Windows machines.
After four months the supervisor still hasn't figured out how to change the "You Suck" message that crawls across his screen saver , nor can he figure out how to put the taskbar back on on the bottom of the screen.
photosMy Photostream
This isn't exactly wide roll-out but my town has a pretty big Unix backend on nearly all of the city's systems. There's several big rooms filled with old Sun machines and if you go to the court offices every secretary has an X terminal on their desk (though they usually have a Windows PC as well). Besides city government and the courts I'm sure there's a bit more Unix usage but I haven't seen it personally. Though none of these are free and so you don't see them as real Unicies but oh well.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This is slightly on topic; it's something that made me laugh and I'm reminded of it anytime I hear of this subject. The short description; a response on Declan's politechbot to "Citizens Against Government Waste", an MS-funded 'grassroots organization' (pfft), from Roblimo. He made an observation that's been made before; that the Government would save a lot of money if they weren't paying for Windows licenses. I'd just never imagined it could be made at such a perfect moment, to such a perfect audience as a farcical group of Washington watchdogs who claim that their struggle for an end to the MS antitrust case is only part of their desire to combat Government waste. And of course the icing on the cake is that CAGW never replied. Anyway, here's CAGW's original press release and here's Roblimo's response.
Is currently migrating all of their legacy apps to Java based web apps (WebSphere/DB2). RUS handles all loan management for USDA, it's a truly huge effort that seems to be going reasonably well. RH 6.2 is the platform (because IBM officially supports it and everyone has heard of it). Still using Win NT 4 for desktops, however.
Here's the run down:
We have a linux cluster running a high resolution display wall for large scale simulation presentations (and to play quake3 on
One general purpose linux cluster (16 dual process machines of the 800 Mhz vintage)
There are several dual processor alphas running linux as stand-alone servers....A lot of the scientific computational stuff happens on these....think fortran
There are 2 or 3 intel based clusters (32 or 64 dual processor 1.7 GHz machines per cluster) in the works...and another one just to run the TRANSP code that I can't play on is operational...mutter grumble
The lab got part of a big computing grant from NFS i think to drasticly expand its computing power....so I'd imagine a large (100+ node) linux cluster is in the works for PPPL as well
On the more mundane side of things....
I just got a linux box up and running with 5 ics645 digitizer boards (32 channels 2.5 Mhz per channel) to be used as the main data aquisition computer for MRX....if more PCI DAQ equipment becomes available for linux, I'd imagine a lot of the smaller experiments at the lab would jump to linux.
There was also talk of replacing alot of the old er desktop pc and xterminals with stripped down linux thin-clients....but I dont think that's gonna fly.
It's hard for me to keep up with the specifics since I'm just a user....
The point is most if not all the scientific computing power at PPPL will be on Linux in the near future. The desktop space at the lab is firmly in the hands of the large mac user base right now.
-jef
As it stands right now where I work, we can't use Win/2K in a classified area (DOD Secret, or beyond) because it has "too many security holes"...
So we are stuck installing NT4/sp6 on the machines because "most of the holes have been patched".
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Friggin DOD.
Of course, remember that these are typically standalone machines, in a soundproof/EMI-proof alarmed room, a large combination lock on the door, and badge-swipe/PIN# access... and the hard drives are removable and locked in a safe (another combination lock) when an "unclear" person is in the room (or the room is empty)...
... yah.. Win/2k will be more unsafe than NT4 in this case, huh?
Even on networked machines, this is still the same case. c'mon, everybody who has access to the room has been cleared for the project and is supposed to be "trusted"... no outside connections, just a small network in a sealed area. But its still a problem... "NT4 is safer than Win/2k".
runs their financial database on Oracle 8i I think it was. It runs on Solaris OS. As far as email is there any unix solution that can rival exchange? And I mean have an integrated address book so users won't have to hunt down and remember email addresses.
If you took the above seriously... don't.
Even in the days of ballooning military budgets, DoD systems RARELY used a custom OS. Do you realize the manhours it takes to do something like that??
Having been a wage slave (read: enlisted) for the DoD for the last 13 years, I've never used a customized OS, and I'm in Intel! Currently, my day-to-day OS is WinNT, and we just installed an NT network to replace our beloved VAX cluster running VMS. Before that, I've worked on Sun, SGI and HP boxen, using lots of custom written apps, but always using the native OS to get basic jobs done.
Wu-Tang Name: Half-Cut Skeleton Get your own Wu-Na
I agree -- this was good commentary.
:(.
:(.
From the part of the USAF that I've seen, it seems that they've been trying to convert from proprietary "custom built" systems like the mainframes they used to have to civilian "vendor" stuff so that they can upgrade as quickly as the new technology is implented (as opposed to their cold-war philosophy of being the center of technical innovation and developing equipment that is years ahead of the civilian world only to find twenty years later that they're behind with old equipment because it was just too hard to upgade the proprietary stuff).
Thus USAF = Cisco and MS. MS and Cisco have taken the responsability as vendors in case there are "security leaks" and the USAF completely endorses them. Any choice by a installation commander to use anything else makes the responsibility of "security breaches" fall 100% on them where if they chose MS, it would fall on MS. Thus very few commanders choose anything but MS and Cisco and any attempt to pursuade otherwise often falls on deaf ears.
It rather scares me that the USAF is now under the control of vendors, however I feel that somthing is better then nothing.
To give you a perspective of the proprietary to vendor roll-over, up until last year the only text-messaging system that was endorsed by DISA for combat sceanrios was 'STAMPS' -- a proprieatry teletype system dating to the early 70s. Last year DISA rolled out "DMS" (defense messaging system) which is a MS Exchange server. I am saddened that the USAF choose insecure MS products for combat scenarios, however I'm happy that they've AT LEAST finally approved e-mail for combat!
They're having a tough enough time trying to implement technology of the 1990s, never mind mixing in *NIXes that would require extensive training for the admins. I don't forsee any *NIXes permeating the Combat Comm arena anytime soon
If it were the cold war and DoD did not have the vendor philosophy that it has now, I could forsee all types of neat innovation using the Open-Source *NIXes in a proprietary manner (and thus still reamianing the leader in technical innovation), however DISA have given up all motivation to be a technical innovator any more and just wants to try to implement civilian technology that hes been around for years and replace their VERY old proprietary equipment
The army's landwarrior runs on win2k. Personally my experience with win2k is it's been extremely stable. Close to rivaling our solaris based firewall.
I used to work for a company that makes money as a Seat Management partner for the state of VA. What this means is that the company does something similar to leasing equipment to the state. This company is one of 4 or so 'approved vendors'. Each vendor offers a set number of packages, each standardized around offerings from Dell or Gateway or Compaq. To my knowledge they all ship w/ Windows, tho some would go out w/ a totally blank disk. These include servers, all of which at the time were NT 4. This was pushed by the Republicans Governor's office, but didn't seem to be taken too fondly by the different departments.
FROM http://www.seatmanagement.state.va.us/ - " a program that bundles a desktop PC and a suite of necessary support options for Virginia agencies and institutions. Your organization can transfer the responsibility of supporting the life cycle of desktop computers and servers, in exchange for a nominal fixed "per seat" fee. This fee includes: a new PC every 1, 2, or 3 years, project management, initial desktop rollout plan, configuration, installation, user orientation on new PC, maintenance, asset management, disposal and technology refresh, plus optional services."
Does this scare anyone else?
Here is a little problem. A vast majority of DOD computer users are exactly what you have in the civilian private sector, not very computer literate people who are just trying to get their job done, admin type people. In my relatively short time in the military (USAF) I would have to say that Admin people out number just about any other career field there is (the AF version of the MOS is called the Career field). I don't mean the admin career field is that huge, but every shop, weather they have an actual IM troop or not does have an admin section of some sort, and like the rest of the world the Admins run windows.
As far as security is concerned when I asked if I could set up a small SuSe file server for my users the Comm Squadron told me that we were expressly forbidden to run Linux on the network.
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
I work at a NOAA branch; everything in our department here is almost 100% Linux, with one or two sysadmins for Windows systems.
Of course, we also do software development. And what's better to develop on than Linux?
Shit. I just fed the troll. Sorry.
(I actually don't mind feeding trolls with accounts. It's the nameless bastards I have a problem with)
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
I'd expect them to know what that phrase actually means. Optimistic of me, I know.
Look for ModSAF, OneSAF, JCATS, JANUS to start. Also have seen some cool stuff like the ODT that consists of several Linux PCs. This is an omnidirectional treadmill with a soldier walking around a virtual environment wearing a HMD and shooting things. This of course interfaces with all the simulation stuff including full scale mock up tanks, Bradleys and HMMWV (mostly SGI based). Oh yeah and interfaces to real C4I systems (C4I Gateway -Linux) so someone in an excercise wouldnt know what is real and what is simulated. The real C4I systems are a mix of Solaris Sparc (ABCS systems: MCS, AFATDS, CSSCS, AMDWS, ASAS, IMETS, etc), Solaris Intel (FBCB2), and NT ("Lite" versions of most of the ABCS systems running on laptops). FBCB2 has been ported to Linux (or at least EBC) by Mitre, who also developed the C4I gateway. Mitre looks like it might be a good place to work. Check out http://www.vita.com/vso/vso200005/MITRE/opensw.pdf
When I was attempting to join the ARMY I noticed the computer desktops had a pastel and very UNIX-like look to them. Heyyyy...it's CDE!
It was refreshing to see something other than that nasty green color or the silly win95 clouds and tiresome icons you see in the EVERY other office.
It was also nice to see that office workers can be just as inept with UNIX as they can with Windows. Where is that darn icon?!? Oh...you have to click it twice...fast. It's so strange to see people working with computers apparently hating them for whatever reasons. But hey....I hate working with lots of other things...so maybe I understand the resistance.
I didn't ask the guy what they were running on the backend....because...well, he seemed 'Upset'.
- Life is what keeps you occupied while you are waiting to die
The government is just starting to realize that they will probably get more assurance about their operating systems if those systems are source-available. Note that the program funding NAI is funding several other open source security projects, such as Sardonix (http://immunix.org/sardonix/) and tools for advanced code analysis (http://www.securesw.com/Projects/CHATS/).
The government has been interested in commercially-viable B-level secure operating systems for a long time, and, believe it or not, they are starting to see Darwin as the most viable candidate. Apple is willing to ship an OS with built-in mandatory access control primitives to every consumer (off by default), if the open source community performs such enhancements to the kernel. They've even started a consortium for promoting this goal (STOS; Secure Trusted OS). Several government agencies, including the NSA, are members of this consortium, and I would expect to see them funding several promising projects.
I just left the USAF, where I held a sys admin position that used a SCO System 7 server on the SIPERNET. I had a Linux box on my desk that I used for graphics manipulation on a web site I built for my Squadron. The box was my own. Only NT or 2K is allowed on all USAF computers attached to the LAN.
Everyone I spoke to in IT positions were Windows people and they knew nothing of Unix. The LAN was always down for various reasons. Very fustrating, but not the reason I left.
Let me see if I understand this, one of the reasons you left the DoD is because they couldn't come around to running a free OS ? I wonder what your job there must have been, such that you decided you just could not work there unless you ran Linux - did they hire you as an Open-source evangelist ? When you accepted the position did you think the DoD was hiring you to convert them over to Linux, instead of, say, doing some other job ? What exactly was your job title such that running Linux was so crucial to your job satisfaction there ? And what about that slashdot story where a few office workers were loudly and roundly ridiculed because they just couldn't be productive on Linux ? Why isn't this story just as ridiculous ?
I work at NIH (which is technically part of HHS). I use Irix and Solaris daily (along with Mac and occasionally various flavors of Windows when it can't be avoided). Our lab's web server is a Linux box, and we're currently gearing up to try running some of our calculations on a Linux cluster.
Until very recently I was working in a Molecular Biology Lab at the USDA Agricultural Research Service in Albany Ca. The agency does use Solaris to serve its e-mail, but almost everything else, from fileserving to administration uses NT
Some of the scientists (albiet very few) run *nix-boxes for their research. I had set up several Linux boxes to run bioinformatics software, and had to fight with the sys admin every step of the way! I was constantly tormented by computer guys chewing me out because they were afraid my computer was not as secure as others on their NT network. The sys admins there lived under the constant idea that Linux boxes are insecure because distributions come preloaded with a zillion unnecessary daemons (FINGER!? Telnetd?). I was burdened with the job of trying to prove to ignorant NT people that I had sufficiently locked down my Linux boxen, and that my computer was more secure than the other NT servers.
But why are you reading this? Go check out SmurfDot, slashdot with a Smurfs theme, or ThunderSlash, News for ThunderCat Nerds!
Get your head out of your ass. The mil uses standard, off the shelve hardware/software in most cases. Hell they had NT running the propulsion system of some ship a couple of years ago and had to tow it back to port after NT crashed......
I won't say which org or base I'm at, but we have:
- Most web servers are RedHat / Apache
- Most MTAs are sendmail
- Many SGI systems, including several supercomputers, for test and analysis
- a 40-node Linux Beowulf cluster
- Several large Sun boxes, with Oracle, for financial/administrative applications
- Most of my group uses Linux for their desktop
- Many "infrastructure" systems are *nix (accounts management, Tivoli, network admin, etc)
we have plenty of linux. My biggest surprise at both an intellectual and professional level of discovery was that 'just because it's OSS doesn't mean it's the best tool for the job." Now, I had no excuse for this epiphany; I've been using linux since 1994 and my dad's been a gov't contractor since BEFORE I was born (er...more than three decades ago); he's been expressing that very simple thought for nearly a decade, but I was a zealot. I have to admit we mix Irix, solaris, linux, *bsd, dec, and hp somewhat seamlessly.
If virtue is its own reward, jsut imagine what vice offers!
i don't think that guy was a troll, i was laughing heartily at your original post too. i mean seriously, perspective. turning down jobs because of an os is hilarious, in a pathetic kind of way.
Most government agencies operate under extreme budgetary stress. (with many exceptions)
At my office the best/cheapest solution wins. The only disadvantage to this is that our datacenter looks like a computer zoo. We have everything from Unisys mainframes to 2U rs/6000's to sun e10ks. Lots of windows nt, dos (!) and sys v stuff glueing everything together as well.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
As a former USDA worker, I know that this is a good thing! I can't describe how many hours are spent wrestling with the outdated (mostly DOS based?!) legacy database programs that the USDA administration must endure.
As for the Agricultural Research Service, where I used to work, the only *nix that was being accepted was for bioinformatics research, and the sys admins hated having these extra boxes on the network, because they were afraid of administrating them!
Check out SmurfDot, Slashdot with a Smurf theme, and
ThunderSlash The Thundercatified version of Slashdot!
That Mac use at NIH led to one of my favorite (though now well behind the times, I guess) pieces of free software (I think only little f free, though) on my old mac IIfx, the most expensive computer I have ever personally owned.
:), and there's a Windows knockoff too, and a similar progam for *nix in Java.
...
OK, now I'm inspired, and have just downloaded it to my iBook -- here's the main web site for Image:
http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/
Good stuff, and it turns out, full source code is available
Some of the filters (I like erode and skeletonize) still hold up very very well, though I don't see a release date on here for the version I just grabbed
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
That's part of the deal where we agree to do no military research (nothing at Fermi is classified)- God loans us our computers :)
Some people get paid more as contractors - but it's not as cool or as permanent.
The data is absolutely enormous. Massively parallel deticated hardware trying to filter out the "unimportant" events - we only keep the important ones. The "important" ones that we record is something like a CD/sec. I suspect that that's an approximation of saturating our network.
It's not what I work on, but it's very cool.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
The EPA has a very limited use of *nix OSes. Individual sites seem to dictate their own policies in the application of *nix. At my location it has been outlawed in the desktop, but is used as a dhcp server and probably some other limited functions. Personal I wish that we used it more, because I feel it's more stable, cost effective and the OS is more interest, but there's clearly an adversarial position that has been taken in the use of *nix OSes. The agency standard mail is Lotus Notes and I would love to install Domino on Linux to work with as an admin, but our site fears that we would be unable to completely secure linux. I pray that other agencies have better luck using alternative OS. I don't always feel that linux is the best (example #1 I would not install it on the desktop without a Lotus Notes client, because our end users are confused enough with Windows), however I think many task would be performed better and easy on a *nix OS (example #2 a new workstation was purchased to implement a web based kiosk, when the same old system could have be reformed with linux and run just as well. I'm thinking the Gov paid atleast $800 for the workstation + $120 for Windows 2000). For an agency that is on a budget I think EPA spends money like their funding is limitless.
NCI down in Maryland uses Linux to view all their DICOM (DIgitial COmmunications in Medicine) images. They are located in the National Institutes of health so I would assume other organizations there use it as well. I'll find out more when I go down there to setup some equipment (yes..its linux)
Read the article, analyze what few details are provided. Now explain to everybody why you think the buggy software was written by Microsoft.
Hint: It's talking about a client/server database app.
I thought this myth had already been thorougly debunked. I guess it just won't die.
Yes, for example, in the past, the DoD provided initial funding for the development of a GCC front end. Of course, you have already guessed, for which language: Ada. These days, this front end (called GNAT) has finally become part of the official GCC sources, BTW.
The DoD even mandated that the source code is licensed under the GPL. The front end is reasonably independent of the GCC backend (JGNAT which targets the Java virtual machine exists, and it doesn't use the GCC backend), so this makes indeed a difference even though GCC itself is GPLed. (The developers, however, would have chosen to use the GPL even without being forced to do so.)
The army uses Sparc Solaris quite a bit in their "digital infantry". They have custom tough boxes in air-drop boxes, that they use for email, operation orders, and map boards.
Their software doesn't seem too exciting, though.
Depends on what the systems are for as well. I work for a Navy contractor and we are deploying systems to the fleet running on dual-processor Linux boxes. We used to deliver Silicon Graphics systems, because our software is very graphic-intensive. However, the graphics cards for PCs have come a long way. :)
And it annoys the crap out of me every time I go to fill out my FAFSA (Federal college financial aid eligibility form, for those who aren't aware of it). They have one of those annoying browser version checker things that only allows some fairly old versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer from Windows or Mac. Nothing from Unixes or Linuxes. Bleah.
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
Check out the LinuxBIOS work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. We also have a few Linux based clusters used for physics simulations and bioinformatics research. http://www.acl.lanl.gov/
Err, hello? Last time I checked, Solaris was a "*nix". Given the title of this article,why are you complaining?
Or did you REALLY mean the topic to mean, "Which Government Agencies are open-source -Friendly?"
It should also be noted that the whole "Trusted BSD" thing is just an attempt at imitating the long-standing "Trusted Solaris" B1-level operating system.
I work at NSA. It varied widely as to what people used, usually dependent on the person's job & duties.
The current "official" platform is NT 4 (Win2K has not yet been approved). Many people still use Sun for their work, and a few use Linux or Win2K or whatever else is appropriate. The SELinux is not used as it is considered a prototype/research product. Many servers are some flavor of *NIX, probably Solaris
Techies generally choose what they want depending on their job duties (some people have multiple machines at their desk), non-techies almost always have NT.
An encouraging word for Linux is that there was one guy soliciting help on the internal newsgroups that he was trying to get Linux to be the next official enterprise baseline for the desktop workstations. However, since the 11th, network use is required to be kept at a minimum, so he hasnt been able to do much on that front.
Also, because of the current position of NSA's activities, major changes wont happen anytime soon.
The reason we still use NT 4 as opposed to a more current version is because we must take time to evaluate the system's usefulness and how converting will impact mission. ALL software products go through this evaluation before we can use it on mission systems. (ie - Office 97 is still current, not 2K or XP)
Where I work, we've been able to move several machines from the various MS and Unix OS choices to Linux.
The problem is management is scared of anything potentially complicated. They want to know that if you are run over by a bus at lunch, they can keep the facility running.
I've seen a lot of big Unix installations that only 1-2 people can keep running. How do you replace those people if they take another job or are both sick at the same time?
Don't get me wrong...the same is true for Windows, but MS has a massive FUD machine that makes it seem like running a complex installation of Windows machines is as easy as using Excel.
When a manager sees Admins using something remotely resembling Excel to get their jobs done, they figure it will be easy to replace that person and keep things going when the time comes. There is a much larger pool of MS people around that *nix people.
My recommendation: Don't be afraid to query people during the interview about Linux use. Make it clear that you enjoy and use open source. Challenge the "PC Week" Microsoft FUD campaigns in a gentle way.
Let the employer know "up front" you beleive in Open solutions, and although it may take you longer to get a job, you will both be happier in the long run.
Also, consider taking some of the free online courses from the Sun Microsystems site for their "Forte" IDE. This cross platform beast is resource hungry, but the "New Template" wizard lets you create everything from desktop apps to XML/DTD/CSS jsp apps to Javabeans...deploy, test, debug locally/remotely...cvs interface...all in one cross platform environment.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
This condemnation seems to equate Solaris with Microsoft products, which, at least in recent years, is definitely not the case.
The source code to Solaris can be downloaded and compiled. There is a book, called "Solaris Internals" that contains a thorough discussion of how Solaris works and why it is designed the way it is. Sun publishes a great deal of documentation for Solaris and its other products for little or no cost to the consumer. This documentation is also fair, in that the pros and cons of the products are discussed. Sun doesn't make things out to be what they aren't (perhaps exluding pertinent Java hype).
I feel comfortable working with Solaris knowing what it is and what it is made of. This makes Solaris about as close to Open Source as a proprietary OS can be. This is something that is unlikely to ever be said about anything produced by Microsoft.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, VA, has a Linux Farm of a hundred or so boxen running Linux for data processing and storage. Go JLab!
Here at NOAA, I know the line office I work in uses Suns and HPs extensively for servers, as well as some VAX and DECAlphas, and we do a lot of cool things with them. We also happen to do a lot of cool things with Windows 2000, but more on the workstation level. I can't really speak for all of NOAA, or the Department of Commerce, of which NOAA is a part, but I'm sure there are plenty of government agencies that use Unix and Linux.
I'm also familiar with several labs at NIH that use Linux almost exclusively. The few exceptions in these labs are things like some SGI and Solaris machines, and a very small number of laptops which dual boot Windows and Linux. If you look, you can find many government job opportunities that require Unix and/or Linux knowledge, and a lot of them are challenging.
-N
At least on the web end of things, USDA seems pretty friendly. Their web server is running Solaris. The USDA Forest Service's server uses AIX. Both Apache. My university department works on a number of grants involving Forest Service web projects--all Linux.
I work for the Navy. I'm the IT department head for a medium sized command in one of the Navy's smaller operational claimancies.
There's a bit of misinformation or mistakenly-eliminated information in some of the posts here. NMCI is not replacing all desktops, laptops, and servers in the Navy with Windows. The majority of administrative systems, networks and servers will be replaced or managed by the EDS contract.
Many Navy commands have multiple systems and networks (other than their standard administrative systems), many of which are operational or tactical in nature. Those machines often run very specialized software developed both in-house and by contractors. This software runs on a variety of OSs and hardware, and little of it will ever be ported from one system to another. In the nearly ten years I've worked for the DOD, I've managed/configured/supported dozens of different applications running on a variety of off-the-shelf and customized systems.
What the Navy is trying to get their arms around is the cost and management of their administrative systems, which make up a majority of their ashore and afloat computers. The posters here who are griping about the fact that EDS is standardizing on Win32 platforms and apps fail to understand that within the Navy's administrative world, there needs to be standardization. There are hundreds of thousands of users stationed all over the world who have the need to share data, documents, and other information. For their needs, standardizing on something like Office 2000 on a relatively secure Windows 2000 platform simply makes the most sense, from a management point of view.
We have a small network here, and the admin systems here are standardized on Windows 2000, with Office 2000 as the suite. We also run a variety of other Windows-based apps. Our network is well-secured, and I have very few problems with Windows 2000 server and client systems. Naturally, I work very hard to manage and maintain them in the most efficient way possibe, which includes constant security monitoring. If someone cracks my system, it's not always the fault of the systems...I have to keep up with the security requirements to keep the bad guys out...just as I do with my non-Windows systems. Could Windows be more secure? Sure. But for my admin users' requirements, and for the size of my LAN, it works great.
My other non-admin systems run everything from Linux to Solairs to HP-UX to Windows, with off-the-shelf and customized applications that are, very often, the only things running on their host systems. I have to maintain security monitoring on those systems, too. However, I'm looking forward to NMCI's arrival, not because I'm necessarily crazy about thier deployment concepts, but because I can now hand the mundane management of admin systems (file servers, mail servers, net connections, backups, help desk, installations, griping and moaning, etc.) off to someone else. There's an upside to everything...
Then, I can concentrate on managing my (non-Windows) web servers and operational systems, developing content and tactical products, and doing the kind of creative stuff I don't get to do on the admin side.
Those who believe that the Navy is taking the wrong tack in moving to a Windows-based admin network aren't looking at the big picture. To try to move, for example, to an entire Linux-based network system, with the necessary design, configuration, training, and installation changes necessary would require manpower, expertise, and cost far beyond the $4-6 billion the NMCI contract will cost. Free operating systems require management as much as the commercial ones do, and that management and support isn't free.
Even more important is the massive cultural changes that would be necessary to move in that direction. The people using these systems use them in their jobs. They don't care, in most cases, what the OS is. They have no concern about open source vs. commercial. They use Office. They use Outlook. They expect the computer to work a certain way when they log in, and they expect the same applications to be there every day, they expect them to work a certain way, and they need to be able to share information without worrying about whether or not their StarOffice presentation is going to work on the system of some guy on a ship somewhere.
People like me are trying very hard to make sure open source is being implemented in the operational and tactical areas of the fleet. We know how good these things are, and we push them hard, despite the ignorant restrictions placed on us from using these tools. My webserver wasn't shut down by nimda and code red, because I decided a long time ago to buck the trend by going to Linux and Apache. I watched hundreds of Navy-based web servers fall to bits during those events, even to the point where entire military networks had to block port 80 requests to stem the tide. My SSL-enabled server chugged along with no problems.
Open source has it's place, and Win32 does as well. Where they belong depends on your point of view, and what you're trying to accomplish. Perhaps, someday, when a stable set of productivity apps for open source *nix systems exists, you might see some changes. But, they don't right now, and that's why the Navy is moving in the direction it is.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
At my last assignment we used a very good assortment of hardware including, an Alpha Open VMS system, which was primarily for development, two Sun Solaris servers that were going to take over the workload of the Alpha server once all the operational code was transitioned over. And of course there was the Windoze server, that controlled all email and web services. Kind of a Franken-office if ya ask me....
I hope you realize that just about every *nix (including the BSDs and Linux) run on hardware other than x86.
Fermi Lab (www.fnal.gov) uses lots of sgi boxen, as does NASA. Not a free Unix.... yet. Wait until sgi files for bankruptcy :)
heyitsme
But as every good Open Source guy, he's being Open, you can't blame him for that.
It's x86 machine code for:
MOV AX,4C00 (note little endian)
INT 21
or, in terms of the old DOS days, exit(0). The fear comes in when you see it, know what it means and realize just how full your brain is of stuff you are never likely to use again...
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
So, a FOAF is in the US Air Force, where they taught him Mandarin and he's working somewhere in Maryland... But that's not important right now. Anyway, as you can imagine, he dosen't talk much about what he does, but all we've been able to get out of him is that he uses his language training and uses UNIX...
What was it that I heard about the NSA having acres of supercomputers in sub-basements of their HQ? I would bet there aren't many Windows installs down there.
- emilio
neurostyle dot net - it's all in your head
Of course they could use Linux and Open Source but it's the DoD, their philosophy is not to be Open, it's to be as close and as secretive as possible. Looks to me like they got the OS's that match their philosophy. It's not like they're going to develop Open Source software.
48 2 unit, 2 cpu 1ghz machines in three racks all run by Fermi's homegrown redhat distro.
And this is just one of our farms.. there's another linux one that I don't work on back in there, somewhere, with similar capacity.
Linux is becoming the standard desktop here as well. The price/performance ratio has really cranked up linux's desireability. PBS-type systems are getting popular here, too. Many linux desktops are linked into a homegrown batch system that they're trying to get off the ground, which is intended to build software of various types.
Linux is definetly big here.. and it's getting bigger. They hired me on just because of the influx of linux that's appeared.
DoE is probably the most Unix-friendly environment I've ever seen. When you check those lists of the world's most powerful supercomputers, DoE labs always occupy the majority of the top spots, and all on Unix.
Thus USAF = Cisco and MS. MS and Cisco have taken the responsability as vendors in case there are "security leaks" and the USAF completely endorses them. Any choice by a installation commander to use anything else makes the responsibility of "security breaches" fall 100% on them where if they chose MS, it would fall on MS. Thus very few commanders choose anything but MS and Cisco and any attempt to pursuade otherwise often falls on deaf ears.
Not exactly true for all systems. The Last AF base I was at before I got out had two firewalls running Sidewinder OS (modified BSD). Also a few other security related boxes run various unixes.
They're having a tough enough time trying to implement technology of the 1990s, never mind mixing in *NIXes that would require extensive training for the admins. I don't forsee any *NIXes permeating the Combat Comm arena anytime soon :(.
Not true at all. Look at the ACOMS units. The one I was assigned to was the downsized remnants of the 4th Combat Comm. I spent almost four years running a deployable 50 station Solaris network. Drug that damn network all over hell and back too.
Sure that would be great in the long run. But the benefit for government and really large buisnesses have by using Solaris is that if a big box goes down or is really screwed up, and none of they're people can fix it, they can call SUN and get someone on plane in seconds to go fix it. Companys and esspecially the government can have little or NO downtime. If they stuck a bunch on money into open source it would make a great product but having highly skilled reps on hand when ever you need it is something they can't live without. This is also the reason they go with Cisco, Cisco and SUN have ALOT of certs and alot of people on hand that have sick skills the companys can't afford to keep on hand locally. It's the same for military, money isn't the issue. It's stability. "When you know Unix, you will know the world. When you know NT... you will know NT."
Enter the government agency whose sole purpose is to spend public funds (i.e. taxes), and if the moon is right, offer a useful service. Such agencies are not bound by The Bottom Line, because regardless of the utility of their existence, they are budgeted money to spend. (In public circles, this is known as the "Spend It Or Lose It" rule.) Consequently, money is spent on needless resources. Third-party software in-house programmers could have written. A dual-processor server running Ultimate Bulletin Board. Tens of thousands of dollars of support options for software nobody in-house wants to touch. Herein, the mighty Bureaucracy takes root.
I submit my place of employment, a state agency, as a prime example. Despite a streaming media viewership that numbers in the ones on a weekly basis, we continue to renew our RealNetworks licensing (don't laugh) for thousands of dollars a pop AND increase the volume of televised programs we will agree to stream. If we were a private company, we would have ceased and desisted all streaming media activities two years ago. And that was after I exercised some initiative and wrote a web-based scheduler application to handle a moderate volume of programming.
You see, proprietary software/support and government agencies go together like peanut butter and jelly. Government agencies don't have to justify the cost of software and support, because they don't have to deliver like private companies do. I've tried on several occasions to recommend open source solutions, but everytime my proposals have fallen on deaf ears because of budget concerns. You simply can't apply capitalist, prudent logic to this kind of mix.
Well, I've worked (sort of) in high energy physics and it has been my expierence that most high energy physicist run linux. A lot of there projects are funded in part by the DoE. So, I suppose that counts?
Yucca mountain project uses Solaris extensively.
So right now business is in a small-scale rebellion against the Microsoft XP-mandate.
When the Navy mandates Win2k, how much guff do they get from Microsoft about not migrating to XP? Somehow I suspect that the Navy Win2k mandate means exactly that - Win2k. Not XP. Not YP or XQ or YQ, or whatever comes next.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Ask nearly anyone familiar with computer setups beyond a single desktop, the vast majority of money spent on IT infastructure is on support. The cost of buying the hardware and software are inconsequential with the cost of getting knowledgable people to keep everything running.
From this standpoint, standardizing os's and software to reduce the number of things that could go wrong and to reduce support costs seems like a good idea.
This especially makes sense if you are going to be running proprietary navy special apps that one would assume are OS dependent. (May require special client server software so that linux for backend doesn't make as much sense.)
Another support cost story....... (sorry people!)
(I'm roughly getting the numbers right) A firm I worked at over the summer, had around 100+ people, everyone had computers etc... and they have two people employed full time pulling down six figure salaries keeping everything running smoothly. The firm had a 711 or something silly that was 911 for computer help.
Basic econ, the cost of supporting an additional windows box is probably a lot less than the cost of supporting a linux box if you don't have any linux boxes already.
I run linux full time now, but I understand that for many situations, windows is a purely acceptable answer.
Many people are discussing how 'unix is more secure' or 'NT is used in the military, and it messed up that warship'. On and on...
Neither OS is at issue in cases like this. Overall system design is. NT can be JUST FINE for a particular task, if the system is properly engineered, including hardware, maintenance, etc.
Even if the military were to use linux (for all I know they do), they wouldn't be grabbing the latest kernel and patching everything all the time.. they would roll their own distribution (based on a current one or not), and use it, specifically, to build whatever system it is they want.
making something work FOR you, the way you need it to, is more than choosing the right OS. It's the entire approach you use to engineer and maintain a system. This is what many in the linux world find hard to understand.
There is a lot of visualization research happening at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that's using Linux. A lot of the boxes that we do our day-to-day work on are boxes running RedHat 7.1. We're researching how to best use the latest nVidia drivers with GeForce 3 cards.
I've personally been working on scalable parallel rendering. We have a couple Linux clusters that we're working with. The one that I work on is a 32-node cluster with a Myrinet interconnect. Each box has hardware graphics in it. That cluster is hooked up to several displays so that we can explore very large tiled displays. I'm working on a project called Chromium that's hosted at SourceForge.
So I think you could say that the researchers in the DOE are very interested in what Linux can do.
Government research has always been *nix oriented. I am in radar meteorology and most of our specialized software runs only on *nix machines. Linux clusters are becoming very popular, and are appearing everywhere in the atmospheric science community. Check out one of the bigger clusters.
I thought milnet severed ties from ARPAnet years ago. Is "I watched hundreds of Navy-based web servers fall to bits during those events, even to the point where entire military networks had to block port 80 requests to stem the tide." and indication that perhaps there are still some left?
A different kind of animal
Could you all tell me why you're not worried about the fact that the US gov. is using proprietary software and helping to ensure that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison remain the richest men in all history? Do any of you realize that Osama Bin Ladin came from family enriched by monopoly contracts with the Saudi government? Super-rich folks are bad news for political stability. That's why the US was founded in the first place, to give the average joe some relief from the British aristocracy. Open source IS the answer.
Count me as another one whose conscience prevents him from workin in a all M$ shop. I'm a good Unix admin but a mediocre M$ admin because, quite frankly, M$ crap makes no sense to me. And since I think that it's important to do well at my work, I refuse to
work on M$ more than 10%-20% of my time (0% is best!).
And what with all of the BILLIONS Of $$$ spent on pretecting the buggy M$ crap, how can you justify it with a straight face???
Unix makes sense and is easy to use once one gets beyond the lock-in/resistance to change mentality that exists out there.
I worked as an Intern for the Department of Agriculture, and it's strictly a Microsoft shop. There was a madate set by someone up top that EVERY computer in the Department use Windows. It's kinda sad, considering how much M$ wanted to charge us for a WebDAV solution.
I sig for world peace
Don't forget that the Code Red and Nimba worms are spread by many vectors - which means that through email or web surfing they can penetrate into internal networks that are otherwise removed and cut off from the Internet as a whole. I imagine that many internal IIS servers at the government and at corporations were infected via web surfing from internal Windows clients.
-- Join us in Chicago May 1-4th for MeshForum -- writer, historian, tech geek, entrepreneur, internet junky since '91 --
PDSF has grown to a bit over 300 as of this end of fiscal year. It's one of the systems that NERSC runs (you know that Rob, but for the uninitiated...). I am not sure that I would call it a Beowulf though.
Most of our laptops are lil linux machines. For desktops we still use Solaris boxes. We also have FreeBSD on a few servers here and there.
As for other *nix machines, we have the Crays (68 processor SV-1 cluster and a ~700 processor T3E with Unicos and Unicos/mk respectively), PDSF (300 odd cpu mix of Intel and AMD machines w/ linux), Alvarez (a ~200(?) CPU beowulfish cluster), and Seaborg (3000+ processor IBM SP system running aix).
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
>"Last year DISA rolled out "DMS" (defense messaging system) which is a MS Exchange server."
:(
Yeah, and look how that's turned out so far. You're lucky if you can get it working, ESPECIALLY if you can get fortezza cards cut correctly.
And in completely unrelated news, two tomahawk cruise missles destined for Afghanistan accidentally missed their targets and instead hit Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman respectively. The United States government is citing a communication error for this freak accident. Microsoft, in an act of generosity, immediately announced that they had come to the rescue with a patch that they would give to the U.S. military, free of charge, that would ensure that no more Free Software leaders would be blown up due to military computer errors.
Suspiciously, a review of the EULA showed that Microsoft's patch really only guaranteed that Torvalds and Stallman would not be blown up again. A Microsoft spokesperson said that they were reviewing what they called "antiquated sections" that had been included in the EULA.
--
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." - Homer Simpson [1F10]
>However, to really understand things, you have to grasp that policy organizations like Air Staff or AFCA (to use an example from the USAF) typically don't provide funding to back their mandates. That's left ot the command, unit, or installation commander-- it's his people, his money, and generally he can do whatever the hell he wants with it by citing "mission requirements."
;)
That may be true for some areas of the AF, but not AFRC.
I met one of the "kids" in charge of the server consolidation project (yeah, lets see if we can run an entire base on 3 NT servers, plus 2 exchange servers). He looked like he was barely out of kolledge, like this was his first semi-real job!
One of his lakies was even openly hostile towards anything non-M$. Most likely that was only because he didn't have any clue what a REAL OS was like. Man, they'd be pissed if they saw what I have running under my desk and on a government laptop.
Seriously, though. I believe it's all because some idiot politician, or politician wannabe, was shown a demonstration of a point and drool interface and fed the typical crap about being able to do anything a *nix system can. Oh wait, what am I saying? "*nix? That's ancient technology, sir! It's only run on really old mainframes!". hook, line, sinker.
I worked over the summer at a federally funded research and development corporation (think ``military industrial complex'') in a department that develops various remote sensors such as are flown on General Atomics' ``Predator'' unmanned aerial vehicle. Nearly all of the engineers in my department preferred Linux to Windows, but due to Navy requirements they were required to deliver a Windows NT-based product. Their response was essentially to bring unix to NT. By using Cygwin they were able to program in what looked and smelled liked a Linux development environment, yet it was really Windows NT. Furthermore the code could easily be adapted for customers who were more open minded about Linux. I found Cygwin to be very impressive indeed.
I also have worked at LBL where Linux is nothing short of pervasive. We even have experiments at the south pole run by Linux machines, such as the AMANDA project, a giant neutrino telescope embedded kilometers down in the ice at the pole.
Windows is the defacto choice for most of .mil because of one simple fact:
It's what 95+% of .mil staff use at home.
What does this mean? In the civilian sector, an administrator is hired because he is the right person for the job. He/She submits a resume outlining his training, past job experiences, and his goals. He is interviewed (normally multiple times) before he's selected to fill a position in company X. But in the military arena, you don't apply for an administrator job, you are not interviewed - you are assigned to one. This is not the best way to handle IT manning, but unfortunately, it is the only means available to the military.
If a military IT shop (for example: an AFNCC - Air Force Network Control Center) has to fill its positions with personnel handed to them with no regard for their training, experience, or even interest in working in IT, what operating system do you base your infrastructure on? Answer: the one they are already familiar with - Microsoft Windows.
Many in the IT career fields (AFSC, MOS, etc.) in the military are not there by choice. When they enlisted in the military, it was the field they were placed in. Many of these people have no real interest in the jobs they are doing. In the civilian world, you try to work in a job you have an interest in. This is very true in the IT realm. How many administrators, engineers, or programmers do you know that don't enjoy working with computers? I don't know many. But in my ten years in the Air Force, I would say nearly half of all co-workers had no interest in computers what-so-ever. They were simply filling a position. They could have been filling any number of positons (webserver admin, network admin, system maintanence) with little to no training. With such limited training and so many personnel not even interested in their job, what OS do you base your infrastructure on? Again: the one the available personnel are already familiar with - Microsoft Windows.
Until something other than Microsoft Windows finds it way onto the desktop of home users, the military will be forced to use Windows as it primary OS. If the military did decide to move away from Windows, even if it still held a vast majority of the home desktop, they would have to make a strong committment to truly train their personnel. Unfortunately, I doubt this will happen.
Windows will continue to be the military's OS of choice for many years to come.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
A regional manager for the FAA recently told me that the FAA is implementing all of it's new software on unix machines rather than whatever they had before.
This decision was made very recently, he claimed they were having his people go to "unix school".
http://fanblade.dhs.org:27902
I'm not evangelizing or trolling here, but have you had a look at the latest Star Office 6.0 Beta? I've been a bit disappointed with *NIX based office suites until I had a look at the beta. I was just wondering, since you seem to have a decent opinion on this subject if you've seen it, and what do you think? (Oh and I feel that outlook/exchange could be replaced with insite client/server, but once again...)
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
Under their modernization efforts the plan is to convert *all* apps to linux. Most of the flagship software, used for day to day ops is running on linux already. Unfortunately the desktops are still Win98 using xwin clients, or just straight X window terminals at the desk (at the Silver Spring,MD office anyway).
I am working on something called the NDFD (national digital forecast database) and that is being developed purely on linux.
nothing excels in every environment
Ha ha bloody ha!
Yes, it was better than what came before and NT 4 but it was still decidely ropey piece of code. In particular, as with all versions of NT Server, it appeared to get less reliable as the installation aged for no apparent reason.
And then there's DII COE, mandated for C2 et al systems by DISA - if you start reading the requirements, you'll come away with the impression that all new stuff WILL be W2K.
And at least according to several mid- to high-level AF/Army procurement types, the intent is to be fully W2K.
In fact, Linux and OpenSource don't seem to be on the DISA or DII COE radar - since there's no specific vendor, there's no way to "approve" them.
It seems to be quite expensive just to get into the game (see POSIX compliance testing), and few OpenSource types are likely to jump in. The defense establishment seems to be able (and willing) to waiver practically everything except the W2K requirement.......
Solaris is unix, I think you meant to ask which Government agencies are open source friendly.
-Mark
Full fledged networks running real time on Unix.
Multiplexed nets relying on unix servers as their backbone.
RF nets that are mastered by unix platforms, even if they seem to be "windows friendly"
We use a lot of 'nix shit. You won't see it everywhere, but they are there, in critical roles.
Linux (Smoothwall) is running all WAN operations for an unamed federal agency in 2 NYC offices. The boxes have been up and running for over 2 weeks now serving mail operations as well as all WAN based traffic on dial-up connections. The best part, they are running on surplus P100's w/ 48 MB RAM, try that with Micor$oft.
Obscurity isn't security. Look here. While I hope nobody would disclose sensitive info on Slashdot, a system that's comprimised by posting it's OS isn't secure in the first place.
In-built obsolesence, 9x versions are the same.. it`s a subtle hint telling you to upgrade
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The military version of the Internet is referred to as the NIPRNET. There are routes between the nets controlled by DISA. Recent improvements in switches make the links between the two very fast. I can connect to literally any Internet site, but the DISA network I use can be isolated from the public net pretty easily.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
I spent 4yrs in the coast guard on active duty and 2 yrs in the reserve from 94 - 2001 and they are not *nix friendly. NT everything. When i first got join in 94 the only thing they had was a proprietary OS called CTOS and their contract was and still is with Unisys. Not sure if CTOS was a Unisys only OS or not, it was all text based but did the job. Then in 96-98 they sloooooowly migrated to NT starting with Headquarters, Large Units, and finally migrating to the field.
Yes, they have a lot of macs there - mostly used by admins and medical researchers who need easy to use desktop office systems.
Plenty of Unix and Linux workstations around. (I have seen a few VA Linux 3500s - Quad CPU Xeon boxes) being used as "deskside" workstations for some heavy-duty medical imaging work. Also Dell's, more VA workstations (when they still sold them), etc.
There are also several beowulf clusters on the campus - running linux, of course.
Most important of all - the DC Linux Users Group meets there! (How's THAT for Linux support)
No, I haven't seen Star Office 6 yet, but I have heard good things about it. Again, as I argued before, the case can't be made for making a major switch from one to the other. Personally, I may set up Star Office on an operational network that won't connect to the NMCI resources. But, that will be the exception, not the rule.
As for getting rid of Outlook/Exchange, that isn't going to happen either. The military's Defense Messaging System is based in Exchange and Outlook, and NMCI will eventually integrate it's Exchange/Outlook-based e-mail services into DMS.
Joe Dougherty, Florida, USA
The words I thought I brought, I left behind. So, never mind.
Since no one has mentioned them....
Forecasters at NWS in Suiteland, MD, have *nix boxes all over the place for figuring out what tommorrow and next week and next season may be like. Many of the forecasters are linux-saavy.
NOAA has the big beowulf clusters in Colorado that are used for running weather simulations and forecast models.
The NWS shop in Minnesota that forecasts snowpack and runoff for the Mississippi River basin (flood and river level predictions) has at least one linux beowulf cluster I know of.
The Federal Aviation Administration, at least during my tenure there, relied heavily upon SGI IRIX systems.
While these systems were obviously used for such purposes as flight simulation, they were also used for design and validation of flight procedures, approach and departure procedures, and many many other critical operations.
The FAA got me hooked on SGI, and now I've been called home to the mother ship. Of course its hard not to get hooked when your first exposure was to an Onyx. :)
Cyrano de Maniac
www.linuxbios.org
Basically, the Linux kernel on the CMOS chip. It's been used in clusters, and will be shown off (again) this November at SuperComputing in Denver.
Part of the computational and computer science division (CCS-1) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is working in close conjunction with SiS, ALi, VIA, and less directly with Intel and AMD to put LinuxBIOS on off the shelf motherboards for cheap and effective clustering solutions. Boot time for a Beowulf cluster node (And I know you all go nuts when someone says 'Beowulf') can be as little as three seconds from the instant the power switch is hit. An actual desktop system can load in as little as 11 seconds, though a more realistic number for a not so stripped system would be about 20 seconds.
No slow floppies to wait for
No CDs to burn
No bad clusters on a HDD to worry about
No moving parts to break down.
Just a script that flashes every node's BIOS chip and gives about 2MBit/s bandwidth with practically no latency.
Anyway, so there's another gov't organization doing cool stuff with Linux.
Still plenty of unix at GSFC after all these years.
Lots of Linux and *nix at NASA Langley, too.
One reason to use Free/Open Software? At least where I work, it's less hassle to get permission to download & install free stuff than it is to fill out endless forms, get a purchase order, etc.
I hate to tell you this, but that doesn't prove anything about the security of a linux box. You could say the same thing about windows...the only reason it's insecure, is because the person using it doesn't know what they are doing. Such as getting patches from Microsoft
is the way to improve not only the security, but also to expand national infomation infrastructure to gain next round for information playground.
All the major *BSDs such as OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD support IPv6. And as far as I know OpenBSD stacks IPsec on the kernel and ships any cryptographies without restrictions since the project is based on CANADA.
So if you are considering in terms of security issues, go for any *BSD distributions especially OpenBSD.
Would you mind explaining a few the acronyms, for those of us out in the real world. I got lost at PPPL--what's a TRANSP, ics645 digitizer board (sound I'm assuming?), MRX? This kind of info might actually be interesting if I could understand any of it...
My other computer is your Windows box
LOL. .
It's so nice to see other Combat Comm'ers on slashdot!
I work in the NEXRAD ROC (the people who designed and built the current doppler radar system used for weather forcasts, air traffic control and by the air force). The next-generation (in test and early development, respectively) versions of the Open Principal User Processor (OPUP) (used to process radar data) and Open Radar Product Generator (what it sounds like) run on Solaris and Linux. Current systems run on some archaic Unisys box (that doesn't support ARP, for crying out loud!), with development done on a mixture of HP-UX, Solaris, and linux.
Solaris. We are on a network and run GIS software. Nothing works better in networking than Unix. Volume Management (Veritas) and backup (Networker..blah...I use ufsdump when the index gets screwed up) are easy to manage (inspite of Networkers problems). The few NT boxes I have set up have been nothing but trouble, but needed for some statistical software.
What is this question doing on Slashdot? People please, if you work for the US government you have an obligation at this point to shut the hell up. IT security is one of the things falling under increasing scrutiny during the heightened state of world events and the last thing we need are Ask Slashdot questions like "What government agencies run UNIX". What's next? "What firewall does your government site run?" or "What protocols does your government site allow through their firewall?". We don't need to be broadcasting anymore information to the bad guys than they already have.
(Posted anonymously to protect my sorry ass.)
DMS has been broken twice in real deployments by internal auditors, as reported by FCW. Both times it was misconfiguration of the underlying server that gave enough access for a privilege elevation attack, rather than a direct attack on DMS.
Weakest link, and all that.
But it certainly highlights the real problem with DoD systems as a whole-- retention. Systems are run by (what used to be) 3C0x1's and x2's, at the TSgt level and below. The mantra is, "If you train them, they will separate,"-- i.e., leave for private sector jobs at huge pay increases, not counting benefits.
This is why DoD system architects strive for the Holy Grail of "Zero-knowledge administration." They want systems that can be admin'd by a lobotomized chimp because they're fearful that if they actually train the people they're gone, and then the DoD is out significant cash and still doesn't have a competent admin.
Of course, trading training for service committments never seems to cross anyone's mind (i.e., we'll pay for your MCSE, but you owe us 2 years; or we'll pay fo your CCIE, but you owe us 8 years...). At least, never seems to cross the mind of anyone who could actually look at implementing such a program.
And we all know what a boondoggle that is, don't me? Zero-knowledge administration breeds zero-knowledge administrators. As a result, DoD systems are propped up by contracted help. Of course, contractors don't deploy to a war zone-- at least, not without SIGNIFICANT pay. But that never crosses anyone's mind either.
And then they wonder why every time the auditors go out, they ALWAYS win. Every time.
(Hey, I'm a new student - gotta watch my cents!)
I was both a Peace Corps Volunteer and, at a later date, an employee of the Peace Corps (part of the gov't.).
In 1998 when the Peace Corps was looking to replace their cantankerous mac system (not the fault of the macs), the very quickly zeroed in on win boxes. I suggested to one of the higher-ups that they should look into linux and was told "We want to use a real operating system, Linux is a toy."
Very sad b/c PCVs are known for thinking out of the box and using innovative solutions. Obviously she had not been a PCV.
Sooner or later the dinosaurs will become extinct.
(Posted anonymously to save my sorry ass)
Actually, they opened a DII-COE segment for Linux last year. And of course we're all doing Common Criteria now, aren't we? Red Book is dead. 8)
And don't get me started about FIPS compliance.
One key thing to remember about DoD "mandates" and "requirements"-- EVERYTHING can be waived. Everything. Every single standard, every single policy, every single procedure and every single practice. All of them. It just takes someone with more rank than the commander of the organization that issued the policy to say "mission requirement," and viola! Insta-waiver.
Which is why it's never as clean as the procurement people see it as being. Which in some ways is a good thing-- this is the ONLY thing standing between the DoD and one HUGE IT monoculture.
mad propz goes to the spatula galore
Nah. Linux is good for everything :-)
*Linux-powered door opens, Linux-powered robot walks in and gives Linux-powered Zardus some Linux-powered soda*
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
> That may be true for some areas of the AF, but not AFRC
(Still posting anonymously to save my sorry ass)
Ah, but it is true. It's just that your MAJCOM commander has more rank than your base commander, of course. And more importantly, the MAJCOM holds the purse strings.
Rest assured that Air Staff can't make your MAJCOM do diddly it doesn't want to do. Note that Air Staff really doesn't hold any purse strings.
And as for the rest, it goes back to the zero-knowlege administration goal-- Microsoft tries to offer it, as much as possible. That was the key to the original desktop standardization mandates-- it looked to the people in charge like it could be run by A1Cs who are still working on their OJTs, therefore it must be good.
You are correct in part...the new star office 6 beta is great (for the most part) just the term beta is enough to squash any thought of that.
i'm been trying for a while get permission for a linux box at work (military simulation prime) but the brass isn't budging (yet). here we are windell boxes for desktop stuff and *nix for development.
virtros
Worst. Sig. Ever.
NT4 and 097 was/is a sound choice, as most of the holes have been plugged and procedure to lock it down is stable, hence NSA rating. With XP, the new features and remote borking facility make it less of a goer. Problem. The servers, mail, backoffice stuff is making it expensive to stay on the old os, and a 'new' release every year/fix every week , makes certification hell.
The smart choice is samba/*mail, but how many insist using IIS,and outlook enabled attachment procesing , given that overflows/exploits can, and do occur on pre-mail virus scanning/processing software.A better question is = which govt depts. have already made the decision to go XP . This is an interesting decision, as the heads are basically saying 'stuff the security folk - lets put XP in, and play things by ear'. security patch 767 is the one to look for.
The government funds a lot of university research that is at least published and many times open source as well.
The Navy (and I believe the Marines) are part of an initiative called IT21 which is heavily NT based. They wanted to homogenize their very disparate stand alone systems. Too bad they didn't pick a better platform!
Excuse me but it is the enlisted guys who DO most of the technical stuff! THEY maintain the computers, radars, lasers, weapons etc! The officers are there to manage and usually don't have any idea about how it works! You won't believe some of the clueless things I've had officers say and do over the years. If the computer works at all it is probably the enlisted guy who made it happen!
In my little corner of the Navy they retired a PDP 11/70 in 1998!
It all depends on what part of the "agency" you're talking about. Certainly, there's a lot of push to move to MS on desktop-type systems.
But mission systems are a different matter. To start with, you're talking in some cases about systems that have been deployed for decades. What my company (and we're not alone) has been doing for the last 7 years is migrating these custom OS/HW systems to COTS platforms. In the sonar arena (think the sonar workstations in The Hunt for Red October), we have progressively moved the signal processing systems from custom systems to embedded (VxWorks and Mercury) to Solaris and SGI prototypes to Linux on Intel. Currently deploying systems are using Linux on Compaq Proliant 8500 8-way boxes. The next refresh will be to multiple dual-CPU P4 Xeon boxes communicating over Gigabit Copper Ethernet. Expect to see Itanium-based units in a couple of years. All of this is saving the Navy a lot of money while dramatically improving the capabilities of the fleet.
Do a quick Google search for Acoustic Rapid COTS Insertion.
And it's not stopping there. Plenty of other onboard systems, both in the surface and undersea communities, are moving from outdated one-of-a-kind systems to commodity hardware encapsulated in survivable enclosures.
Cool things with *nix at the DoD? Like bombing the shit out of some third world country?
Actually DMS uses *nix based systems in order to function, mainly for replication and network monitoring.
I've seen many AF bases at looked at their unclassified networks. EVERY base has had a *nix of some form on their network, either as a sendmail relay, Squid proxy, or DNS server.
The deal with the military is administration and standardization. You've got people rotating out every two, three, four years, and they need to see the same configuration at each location, that way they're up-to-speed when they get there.
Unfortunately, if they aren't familiar with the system (i.e. it's their first assignment) then they have to get smart real quick, because they probably just replaced the guy that did know everything.
Generally, those *nix boxes that I see at the base, don't last much longer after the *nix-smart guy has left to his next assignment.
So, you go with MS...because chances are, that's what the last base had, or he's at least played on it at home and knows how to search the harddrive...and when the MS system breaks or needs to be upgraded (and it will) then you just point them at http://www.microsoft.com/technet and tell him to make it happen.
But, to keep this on topic, the AF seems to be *nix friendly, but only in a capacity where it fits a specific need, and not as an enterprise solution.
The GSA pay scales and highly conservative work environment do not do well to attract people who would be willing to implement internal systems other than winblows.
They could just as easily sign a security contract with Redhat or BSDi and give them a ton of money for exactly the same thing that they're now paying MS for. But that wouldn't stock the political coffers of those who get to recommend such decisions for non-technical reasons.
Actually, DMS runs on lotus notes as well. I think the army was using it for that.
Plus there's UNIX machines they use for it too, but not being a DMS guy (I went from being the top UNIX guy at one base to working AUTODIN (or STAMPS) at this one... and they ask me why I don't reenlist) I'm not exactly sure what they're for. The DMS guys don't know either (like the air force would actually TRAIN somebody...)
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
One particular Admiral had a major woodie for Bill Gates' junk a number of years ago ... AND despite the fact that a Neanderthal Technology server shut down (with NO restart capability) the entire power plant of a Navy warship, which then had to be TOWED back into port ... the Navy can't be collectively THAT STUPID, can they?
nuff said
Yes, I realize that. :)
I'm thinking of the bosses of the nerds weighing the choices they have in information technology...but if those bosses don't know about the huge variety of options they have, then they won't even consider any options. That, of course, would be a failing of the IT staff if they didn't inform management of the options.
To branch off, what x86 alternatives are there that are certified (or whatever it is) for extremely critical computing tasks and can run open-source software?
"All mankind is at the mercy of a handful of neurotics". - Norman Douglas
Most if not ALL MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Stations; I think) use Unix to enroll new soldiers and for other accounting tidbits. So if you're thinking of joining or happen to be in a MEPS station you can check it out.
This project is actualy quite simple, a room, some cameras, some microphones, you, a meeting and all on disk and/or live, with or without being process through some filters, ... This while at the same time using and evaluating commercial tools to use our data transfer "SmartFlow" ... and all of that on plenty of Linuxes ... cute I think ? ;)
More details at http://www.nist.gov/smartspace/
-- Martial MICHEL
AMEN to that! I'm faced with a similar dilemma; I'm at a job with M$-Windows prevailing over most everything (except a single novell server and some weird system36 and digital VAX boxes); my interests now lie front and center with Linux and open source stuff.
I have this (rogue) linux box here that I'm typing on to use when I can get away from that Windows crap. I'm beefing up my skills and probably will leave with the right job opportunity.
You what, I take back what I said earlier. My own fellow officers who function as IT department heads are amazed that I have my own domain name and ask me with wonderment "How did you get that?" These are the same type of people most like responsible for NSIPS.
Make it as stupid for the Navy as possible. It's dangerous anytime you ask them to do anything more than stack blocks in a predetermined order.
I work at the IRS, and they are currently modernizing their equipment moving from Pyramid Niles to Sun E10K's, unfortunately we aren't allowed to used open source (not even perl), and C2 security requirements need to be modernized as well (a machine with all services on, and logs (BSM) everything is considered secure - NOT).
Other than that, they prefer NT for smaller jobs; the Databases are in the Terabyte range on the E10k's. I have heard of one small project using Linux, hopefully more will follow.
can you pls send me info on the "Linux segment"? I can find no mention of it anywhere....email directly please....
What government agency is free software friendly and is attempting to acquire said software? MINE IS.
But it's not easy.
Everything in DoD acquisitions is in response to requirements. Where the requirements of the problem are mum, the program office can make some choices.
In my case, the choices we make invoke more general requirements. We want Linux. (We're also open to BSD, but a lot of political capital has been expended on the Penguin, so it's a CLM for me to rock the boat at this point.) AFCA and other agencies, however, need a load of modifications to, and full documentation of, any operating system we want to have on a base network. If it was a stand-alone system, or single-use black box, we wouldn't have these troubles.
And then there is the security tests before fielding, and that costs money in terms of man-hours and result write-ups, even if it's all military and government people doing it.
We're in a position where we're at the vanguard of fielding Linux or a *BSD. This means that no-one in the DoD has ever done any of the tests, modifications, or documentation that are required. Doing things the first time is EXPENSIVE, and I'm not in a "sexy" program that attracts money like fighters or smart bombs. So we're stuck between providing new capabilities for the warfighters, or blowing our money on the certifications for Linux (which is money we'll never see again).
See where the problem is? It has nothing to do with IMPEMENTATION; we just can't FIELD the system until it's approved.
(Sorry if this seems disjointed; I'm writing this in nearly a stream of consciousness thanks to my brain being scrambled thanks to writing convoluted plans to field my Linux solutions. Posting anonymously to protect my program.)
What is hilarious about turning down jobs based on OS? I've told numerous recruiters, HR people, managers, etc. that I wasn't interested in a job because I would have to deal with Windows. Why? Because I can. And in my opinion, life is too short to deal with the frustrations of having to use Windows. Even in today's job market, which isn't like it was a year ago when anyone in a technical field could walk across the street and get a job it isn't so bad that people with a good resume and decent interviewing skills should have to take a job they won't be happy with. What is pathetic is people who think otherwise.
us navy, look at zdnet : http://netscape.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/newsbursts/ 0,7407,2817379,00.html?chkpt=p1bn
Thank you for the support. If you can't tolerate your job, much of the rest of your life becomes miserable. If minimizing my dealings with M$ makes my quality of life better at the expense of changing jobs or some level of salary, that's my frickin' choice.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
FWIW, we're going to be adding 20 to 40 more servers, both Linux & Solaris.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.