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."

Comments

Re:In the DoD, it depends on what sector you look

[Anonymous Coward]

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 :(.

Windows in .gov for much longer

[kir]

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.