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White House Email Follies
Presto Vivace forwards a link detailing a recent House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform hearing on the White House missing emails mess. David Gewirtz's report, carried in OutlookPower and DominoPower (in 6 parts, keep clicking), makes for scary reading. "If, in fact, the bulk of the White House email records are now stored in bundles of rotting PST files, all at or above their maximum safe load-level, that ain't good in a very big way... I object to using the inaccurate and inflated claim of excessive cost as a reason to avoid compliance with the Presidential Records Act."
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
They just need some excuse for "losing" dangerous email messages...
After all, it's not like there aren't answers to the question "how shall I archive my user's email for legal and regulatory purposes?" (Disclaimer- I work for a player in that market, but we're not on the first page of results for that search. So I don't feel too bad. Oh, wait - )
Given all the convenient archival problems, every executive branch email should be archived as a PDF and digitally signed and time stamped by a secure server with the private key in protected hardware. The archive needs to be outside of the executive branch.
is why are the dems allowing the White house off? They should be paying to have all the PST's restored. By now somebody has told them that the white house lied about the costs of the PST files. The need to go after them for perjery as well as getting the emails.
What really bothers me is that not this white house makes nixon and reagan look like boy scouts, but that the dems PROMISED to go after them, and really has done nothing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Is anyone out there still thinking that this White House operates at all near the level of minimum performance required from people in its job?
Anyone still think all this incompetence that always protects Bush and his team is some kind of accident?
--
make install -not war
I find the fact that the US Government runs on Lotus Notes more scary than the fact that they don't have any sort of backup strategy.
I bet if you go over to the IRS, those guys have a rock-solid backup going back many years.....
All their interesting stuff went through private mail servers at the RNC to evade responsibility for document retention under the Presidential Records Act. The RNC systematically destroys its emails and Bush has even invoked executive privilege in ordering the RNC to defy Congressional subpoenas to produce them.
Here I am, some lowly line level system tech for a smallish town, and I'd be handed my marching orders were I even a quarter as incompetent as the white house staff seems to be. Which leads me to suspect:
1) Either they are that incompetent, and it's just a symptom of big government not knowing it's ass from it's face
OR
2) These people are purposefully appearing this inept.
Either option isn't pleasant, and both lead to a serious problem with our government where there will likely be no repercussions from this.
But then, we all knew that already, didn't we?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Considering how much we're spending in what are arguably other countries' wars, I'd find a claim of "excessive cost" for anything laughable.
Someone just needs to 'leak' that one of those archived emails contains a transcript of Osama bin Laden endorsing Barack Obama for president. Then stand back because we are all going to be sprayed with WH archived emails.
Technically, murder-suicide does not violate the golden rule.
So much for those that say watching CSPAN coverage of legislative hearings is as boring as watching paint dry.
The article, despite being spread across multiple pages, characterises the hearing fairly, so I won't bother reiterating except to say that the committee members were indeed uninformed, the witnesses were somewhere between clueless and dishonest, and the politics injected into the situation (notably from the Republicans) was so thick that I wondered whether anything could be agreed upon or any of the issues resolved. Hell, by the end of it, I doubt anyone really knew what the technical issues were, myself included.
The saving grace was watching (no one could hear what he was saying) the soft-spoken White House archivist and remembering the joke about how to tell the difference between an introverted and extroverted geek. Instead of shoes, it was microphones.
Your government in action, folks. The bad guys trying to cover up, the good guys trying to find out what's going on, and both groups taking its cues Microsoft weenies.
Big, corrupted PST files? No problem. Just get Stellar Phoenix PST Repair. "Stellar Phoenix can repair PST files in all scenarios including the common issues listed below ... Oversized PST files with 2Gb problem.
Recovers from encrypted files. Recovers deleted e-mails." U.S. Government price $249 with CD. Immediate download available. Recommended by PC Magazine.
This little problem can be overcome. Just get some image copies of those tapes out to the Internet Archive or Wikileaks, and all the technical problems will be quickly dealt with, the data will go on line, and it will all be indexed.
Are you new here?
Honestly, this is a classic, almost Hollywood-style presidential-aid-villain-style tactic.
First, you dry up all the funding to something so that you can later claim there was not enough money to do it right.
And in the process of doing it "not right" some important stuff gets lost so the people in charge can't be charged later (which they can't anyway, because presidents make a habit of indemnifying their successors and most of the senior staff around them, because if they wouldn't, their successor wouldn't indemnify them...).
Still wondering why people actually get out of their bed and vote?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Elect a President who is a failure (Business, Baseball, Economics, & English) and see what happens. He's the Gym Teacher president
Those who can't do Teach, those who can't teach, Teach Gym.
Elsewhere in the world destruction of evidence is taken as guilt. Is that not the case in the USA?
In the USA, it matters a whole lot who you're talking about whether or not XYZ counts as guilt.
"It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
" Mr. ISSA. Okay. So here we have a situation where the Clinton Administration is on a platform that has to be phased out. Simply, they lost the war of who is going to supply emails. A period of time goes on in which Yes, we are dealing, to Dr. Weinstein's concern, with getting good archives, but we are also dealing with the fact that I can't play my Betamax tapes any more, either, and I can't seem to find anybody who has a Betamax player any more."
Maybe Mr Issa should look here. And Republicans are the ones who lose wars these days.
Meanwhile, the General Services Administration just saved a million bucks of taxpayers money with Notes.
I cannot stand Microsoft Exchange in any of it's versions. It is nothing but an I.T. headache of the worst kind. Try backing up the mail store, I dare you. After spending several thousand more dollars you'll be close but no cigar.
In my former place of employment we used a lot of OSS for things like web, email, database, etc. Even Samba. We had a few MS-SQL environments but I stayed as far from those as I could. For email we used Qmail with a SquirrelMail front end, and for web it was Apache/Plone and databases were MySQL.
The nice thing about Qmail is it stores email in user home folders. They're flat files that are easily replicated and backed up.
When the new administration came in the Director of Admin was paranoid about the fact that I.T. could see her email folder. So they went out and spent a shitload of money on AD, Exchange, etc.
That was a year ago. They still don't have it all running.
With the morons they have on staff up there - and that includes Bush - they can't be sure all sorts of incriminating stuff isn't in them. In fact, they probably assume there is.
So they stonewall.
Read TFA. They're making estimates of the cost of recovery of the PST files as wildly off the mark. They're claiming it would cost $50K just to recover ONE PST file! And half a million bucks to recover 5,000 PST files!
That's deliberately false testimony - i.e., perjury.
Face it, folks. This country is being run by criminals now - just like in Warren Ellis' comic, "Reload". Look up Sibel Edmonds on Google and see just how bad it is.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Slashdotters may think that it looks bad for the President's email systems to be horribly unreliable. Compared with what was probably in those emails, this is nothing. In fact, this whole missing email thing is brilliant, and from the Pres's perspective, a job well done. The missing content gives the Pres a get-out-of-jail-free card. Not that he really needs one, since our Constitution makes kings out of our Presidents here in America, with the ability to do whatever they damn well please.
Japanese scientist: Technically, sir, tomatoes are fags. Military scientist: He means fruits.
Maybe citizens who have some free time on their hands and the experience/clearance necessary can make an organization to do these things for free for Govt agencies. That would be pretty cool because it could be a non-partisan group who does this.
But really, what are the odds that ANYONE in govt would want this? Too bad though.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
And yes.. People will store gigabytes of email on an exchange server... Usually when they are emailing large videos, photoshop files, or do Desktop publishing work. Though I wonder what the Whitehouse doing to take up that much space.
Most email systems are poorly factored information because they duplicate a message for every last reader of a given message. It would save a lot of space and traffic if a given attachment or message was stored in one and only one place rather than replicated en-mass.
Of course, the security for centralizing items properly without being read by non-recipients complicates things, but shouldn't be a show-stopper. Also, the retainment date cutoff of the central server and individuals may be different, which makes some people want to be pack-rats if they can't trust the central system to keep stuff long enough.
A related problem is that people often CC copy everybody and their dog to cover their butts. Thus, we get bajillion messages that don't relate to us.
The whole idea of email needs a big rethink. It's become a jungle monster.
Table-ized A.I.
Those who, cant Use Punctuation; post to Slashdot
If you post it, they will read.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Outlook has PST (Personal Store) and OST (Offline Store) files. PSTs are basically just local mail folder collections. OSTs are used to maintain local replicates of Exchange server mailboxes (so you can still use your email even if you're on the road). In Outlook 2003 "Cached Mode", Outlook also uses OSTs even when connected to the Exchange server, and synchronizes to the server in the background.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208480
PST and OST files -- I'll call them "Outlook stores" -- are both built around the same file format. There are two variants. The original format, which Microsoft sometimes called "ANSI", is limited to 2 Gi byte total size, and 64 Ki items per table. The table limit affects the number of items you can have in a folder, as well as the total number of folders you can have in a PST. (Outlook stores from Outlook 97 and earlier also had a table limit of 16 Ki items, but could be auto-upgraded in place to large tables in newer Outlook versions.)
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/197430
These store limits affected OST and PST alike, so even if you had a nice, capable Exchange server, you could still encounter problems with Outlook store limits.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/288283
With Outlook 2003, Microsoft introduced a new Outlook store format. It's sometimes called the "Unicode" format. I'm aware of no documented limits on the file format. I'm sure there are some, but Microsoft doesn't document them. Microsoft didn't document the ANSI PST limits until long after they started causing data loss, either.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/830336
In versions of Outlook prior to 2002, if you exceeded the store format limits, Outlook would give no immediate indication. The file would keep getting bigger, as the software didn't have checks for the limits. But it would corrupting things, too. In short, silently loosing data.
Eventually, the Outlook store would get so damaged it would stop working. Microsoft provided a utility to truncate the file to 2 GiB to make it work again, loosing more data in the process.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296088
In Outlook 2002, Microsoft added some code to check the limits of the store, and warn/stop if you reach them.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305108
In Outlook 2003, along with the Unicode format, Microsoft added a parameter at which it would consider a Unicode store "full", even though the format can keep going. The stock limit is 20 GiB; you can increase it with a registry tweak.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/832925/
"ANSI PST" does not mean PST is a standard file format; that refers to the character sets/encodings the file uses.
Exchange Server uses an entirely different on-disk storage format, called EDB. There are technical limits, but they're insanely huge (16 TiB per store, 5 stores per database group). Exchange starts to run out of hardware resources (memory, mainly) long before you hit the file size limits. There are license-based size limits in some versions/editions of Exchange. 16 GiB in 2000 Standard, and 75 GiB in 2000 Standard SP2.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Really? And, what, precisely, is it meant to do?
It's primary function would be to store, send and receive emails. Does it do that well? Sure, it sends and receives emails fine, but it sure as heck can't store them correctly. Like the parent says, what sort of idiot decided that a 2GB limitation would be a good idea for a PST file? And what sort of moron let's it save past this point, corrupting the file?!?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How good can a product be if it periodically trashes all of the data entrusted to it? Even better, when it does trash the data, it's in a proprietary format that makes it hard to try to parse through and salvage anything. The proprietary format also means that (like all MS products) if you'd like to use the data in a way MS didn't anticipate, you're SOL.
Based on comparing my experiance with non-MS mail programs (for DOS, Windows, and Unix over the years) to the experiances of MS users, I'd have to say that Outlook (in it's several variations) is a TERRIBLE program.