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Bush Administration's E-Mail Deluge May Overload Archive System
Lucas123 writes "The Clinton administration generated 32 million e-mails. Bush's administration has generated 50 times as much data — 140TB, 20TB of which is email — which soon will have to be archived through a new government-built records management system. The new system may not be up to the task because the technology behind it may not be able to handle the sheer volume of data along with the fact that the Bush administration has been slow in providing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with needed information about the records, according to a Computerworld story. Questions have also been raised about millions of missing e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2006. 'It wasn't until this summer that an intensive effort began to share information,' said Ken Thibodeau, director of NARA's Electronic Records Archives."
If it anything like our corporate mail server I would bet you the number one space filler is people making minor changes on documents then reattaching them and forwarding them back to the same 50 people who just got the previous version of the document, repeated over 100 iterations as the email soon becomes a 2GB mess.
Some database driven mail servers like Citadel, Exchange, Zimbra and probably Domino support only storing the message and attachments once no matter how many people it was sent to.
It goes a long way in preventing the attachment * user mess.
Well, Clinton never tried to insist that his VP wasn't part of the executive branch,
It's called "Unitary Executive." That is, there's only one guy in the executive branch that gets to make the decisions. It's entirely up to the President how much of a role he gives the Vice President. Under George Washington, John Adams lamented that the only thing he could do was preside over the Senate and then, he had no say on anything unless there was a tie. It drove him nuts.
If you read the Constitution, Article II groups the Vice President in with the executive branch, but the ONLY place it provides a job description for him, other than sitting around, waiting for something to happen to the President, is in Article I, Section 3 where it says he is to preside over the Senate and break ties.
As for the rest of your comment, every administration keeps secrets and covers things up. All of them. It's not just a Bush thing or a Cheney thing, it's a Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnson, Kennedy, et al thing. Some are better at hiding it than others... and some people simply refuse to open their eyes if it is "their guy" in the White House.
Stop Koolaid Politics
The Bush administration moved the White House from a Notes/Domino based system to a Microsoft Exchange based system.
Before moving, they'd had no downtime -- even when congress was taken out for 2 days by the code red word (they were on Exchange).
In moving, they mysteriously 'lost' all their backups for a period of time that was suspicious as hell, and now they can't scale to handle the capacity issues they face.
In a Notes/Domino world, this kind of archiving problem wouldn't be all that hard to deal with. You'd just need enough storage for it, and create archives per week/month/year (or an archive per individual's mailbox, or whatever) to put on as much hardware as was required. I single checkbox would be all that was needed to have it encrypted as well.
Oh well. I guess if conveniently "loosing" mail when you don't want it found is one of your design goals, than you probably want to migrate to something less reliable.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Deleting the bit that's already answered, not relevant or whatever can hardly be called 'editing', it has more to do with comprehension.
One of the worst things for the latter is a typical corporate Outlook mail exchange (I know that word...) with at the bottom text that hasn't been read for the last ten replies.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Riiight... Blame it on Exchange.
Seriously, if "conveniently [losing] mail" was the goal of the transition, they could have moved from Exchange to Domino and gotten the same effect.
Forget not, throwing storage (read: money) at any system tends to fix the problem given a competent staff. You don't make a very compelling argument.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Your statement doesn't make sense. Exchange supports and automatically takes advantage of single instance storage right out of the box. What do you need 3rd party software for that disables it?
I run Exchange on a NetApp SAN so everything gets deduped and archived to tier 2 storage if it hasn't been accessed within 90 days. Tier 2 is a lot SATA disks that are backed up to tape. It's not even an expensive solution when you start talking about the cost of enterprise storage.
It's been eight years since the Clinton administration. This is 4x the doubling period based on Moore's Law. While Moore's Law relates to transistor density, Wikipedia says that it's roughly similar to gains in disk storage. So in the last eight years, we could estimate disk storage gains of 2^4 = 16x. This doesn't get you all the way to 50x, but it cuts out a big chunk of the gains.
It's real simple, the Constitution isn't that hard to figure out.
Here is every mention of the Vice President in the Constitution:
Article I, Section 3:
...
The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.
The Senate shall chuse their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.
Article II, Section 1
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same Term, be elected, as follows:
In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President. But if there should remain two or more who have equal Votes, the Senate shall chuse from them by Ballot the Vice President.
In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
Article II, Section 4:
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
The office is also mentioned in the Twelfth Amendment (which changes how the VP is selected), the Fourteenth (regarding who can vote for VP and that they can't have been part of a rebellion against the US), the Twentieth (defines the executive term and succession to President), the Twenty-third (giving DC electors), the Twenty-fourth (banning poll taxes), and the Twenty-fifth (succession).
That said, none of those amendments gives the office any more of a defined role, so we must go by the Constitution itself... which is very straightforward and if there's any doubt, look at the first Presidency, which ultimately defined the office in front of the very people that drafted the document creating it.
So yeah, those "Constitutional lawyers" that see the Vice President's role defined otherwise have a pretty bad reading comprehension problem.
Stop Koolaid Politics
For some ideas of how badly things can go take a look at an MS Exchange users mailing list archive. The thing is so fragile that it doesn't take a lot to lose emails. Those who wish to make personal attacks should consider that I'm talking about more competant and experience MS Exchange admins than myself. I personally haven't touched it since 2002 where the users thought it was reliable because there were really three servers doing the job that any other mail system could be doing on a single server, and where multiple backups and/or mirroring got around the problem of backups being unreliable.
Apparently the current version is not a steaming pile of crap, however I only have MS advertising and fanboys to assure me of this and I also doubt that the White House actually upgraded to the current version. They are most likely running whatever version was installed at the start of the administration. If it's MS Exchange version 5.5 all bets are off and all emails could collapse into a hole of random data and the backup tapes might only contain the statement "file in use, unable to copy".