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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."
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!
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
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.
"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?
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.
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 left a company in '95 that was switching to All MSFT, All The Time. If you think about the state of the MSFT world at the time (WfWG, Windows 3.11, NT 3.51), it made sense. Manager types seemed to believe that NT 3.51 would be cheaper/easier/more productive/have zero defects/shove fried chicked under their drooling chins. The rather different reality made me think twice. Did I want to get caught between Manager Expectations and Shitty NT reality? No. Also, working with Windows was substantially less fun than working with SunOS/Solaris. I quit. That company became little more than an MSFT reseller - they never did anything interesting, and they finally disappeared.
Moving to a company that uses Unix and open source stuff isn't a matter of principal - it's a matter of survival. Remember: your NT certification expires in December, you'll have to get W2K or XP certification at a great cost. In two years, your XP certification will expire and you'll have to get YP certification, again, at great cost.
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 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. [info-sec.com]
h tml
The publisher of the original article that broke the story later admitted that it was based upon "early speculation", their words not mine.
The actual incident aboard a test platform, not an operational ship, let a naive server corrupt it's down database and naive clients responsible for various jobs crashed when bad data was supplied to them. These client applications were required to operate equipment. The OS was not involved and using a different OS would not have changed anything.
From the people on board the ship and who actually worked on the software:
http://www.sciam.com/1998/1198issue/1198techbus2.
"Others insist that NT was not the culprit. According to Lieutenant Commander Roderick Fraser, who was the chief engineer on board the ship at the time of the incident, the fault was with certain applications that were developed by CAE Electronics in Leesburg, Va. As Harvey McKelvey, former director of navy programs for CAE, admits, "If you want to put a stick in anybody's eye, it should be in ours." But McKelvey adds that the crash would not have happened if the navy had been using a production version of the CAE software, which he asserts has safeguards to prevent the type of failure that occurred".
And all the free software available (GNU utils, Perl code, Python code, MySQL, etc.) helps keep taxpayer costs way down.
My God, just imagine if the gov't contributed just a fraction of the cost savings over equivalent commercial software to the open-source vendors! Not only would the taxpayers still save money, but all the free software coders out there would actually have even more incentive to churn out good stuff.
Is anybody aware of the gov't actually paying for this free stuff as an incentive for continued development?
Why is society better off with full disclosure? There are secrets (military, intelligence, etc.) that need to be kept.
With respect to operating systems and applications, the government can have an extra measure of confidence that they aren't being screwed over by some closed-source product of Microsoft or some other vendor, which might have holes that 1) the vendor knows about but isn't interested in getting off his ass to fix 2) not even the vendor knows about yet.
Now, I admit, with open source products and full disclosure there is some risk that wide knowledge of OS and software weaknesses will result in attempted compromises of unpatched systems, but many eyeballses also bring the problem to the forefront quickly.
I can really see why foreign governments like Germany are taking a hard look at OSS, because aside from licensing fees, they have no idea what the hell Microsoft or some spy agency in cahoots with them has put into proprietary software.
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)
While I was in the DoD, I constructed a small office LAN out of some old Alpha 500's that were lying around, and loaded Suse 6.4 on them. I was getting flak from the in house Compaq/DEC guys that said that you couldn't load Linux on these machines because of the BIOS, but after about a week we had 6 machines running with everything the desktop workstations had, and at no extra cost to the MAN....
Strange.
I had credited the German government with a great deal more early enlightenment than other governments (U.S. and France, for example) because of their support of Gnu Privacy Guard development.
I think the NSA's efforts to comb through Linux and make SE suggestions is a real positive development.
I'm sure others will mention this, but there has been a non-trivial use of Linux in the Department of Energy laboratories and research centers.
Mike Warren and colleagues at Los Alamos built Loki and Avalon clusters some years ago - they were featured in Linux Journal, IIRC. CPLant at Sandia uses Linux as its code base for research into very large clusters.
And those are just a few of the higher profile news-making uses of open source. If you were to carefully comb through DOE LANs at over two dozen laboratories, I think you'd find hundreds of open source powered boxes in all kinds of capacities ranging from economical compute servers, web servers, data acquisition interfaces, etc. They are incredibly economical and powerful app servers.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
The NIH has a ton of Macs also. One funny (or sad) note on linux though: I know one doctor who works in the NCI (Nat. Cancer Institute) who installed a Red Hat box and promptly got the thing rooted! Someone from their IS department tracked his rogue box down and asked why he was scanning all of the other systems! Oh well, they did help him recover and he is still into learning linux, but his first effort did not make a very good impression to say the least. I would like to know how he got owned though, probably from another box already on their network would be my guess...
Wanna get high?