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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."
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 :)
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!
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
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)
NSA uses Linux, as is reported here quite regularly. They're about as secretive as you can get.
(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)
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.
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.
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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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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
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!
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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