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White House CIO Describes His 'Worst Day' Ever
dcblogs writes "In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers."
23% down sounds about average for MSExchange servers.
I'm sure they just wasted money buying more of the same crap.
All my machines have a floppy.
I don't understand how adding a peripheral can make the machine "worse"?
TFA indicates clearly not only that there's no urgent need for IT geeks to unionize, but also what havoc they could wreak if they ever did.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
They inherited a system that "lost" months/years worth of emails during the Bush administration. Of course it all sucked, it was designed to.
Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives ...
Considering the sort of people who are using these machines, it seems almost appropriate somehow.
Maybe keeping them technologically underpowered is actually a good thing. Those crafty, crafty White House IT gurus.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
But there are receipts for new computers every year? Obviously the Obama administration doesn't appreciate a no-bid contract.
The problem is the procurement process. It takes a hell of a long time to get IT resources ordered, and often by the time they are actually put into service half of their warranty life-time has expired. It has nothing to do with a lack of knowledge on the OMB IT front, it's got everything to do with the red tape they have to cut through to make anything happen.
Governments have a hard time keeping up. Doesn't matter what they do. Military might be an exception only since they spend so much.
And yet...governments want us to believe, yes I say believe that they offer solutions for every problem that ails ye in River City...because they KNOW what is best for you.
To quote George Dyson: unpredictability means you can never have a complete digital dictatorship with one government or company controlling our digital lives—not because of politics but because of mathematics. There will always be codes that do unpredictable things.
And by corollary, there are forces exerted by individuals and corporations and other countries that counter the forces of any government.
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_dysonqa/2/
Too bad we probably paid billions for such crappy infra.
That's madness! Everyone knows that the floppy drive dictates the speed, quality, and age of the computer!
I have to say I got a chuckle when I got to the part about "inheriting" their IT problems. Obama "inherited" all his problems after all!
Perhaps also known as the last presidential Blackberry. Of course, parts of the government still favor Blackberry, but then apparently parts still like floppy drives too. With the recent /. posts on DOD Androids (not the kind that lead to Skynet comments) and the like, one wonders how much longer even this will last.
The equipment of some government agencies I have worked for is kind of prehistoric. I you are using Windows 95 as a file server, you are in serious trouble.
I used to work there, so I can't unload. Let's just say that the EOP has earned every bit of fail they've ever had. (Including the email system, which is what happens when you put brand new software on past EOL hardware against the advice of the people responsible for actually making it function.)
No redundancy for their e-mail servers off the tails of ol' Bush? I wonder how many of the former president and vice president's e-mails were conveniently lost during some of these white-house e-mail outages...
Too bad they didn't teach George W Bush about IT stuff. With how often he went to Texas to clear brush, he'd have that exchange DB backed up in 5 places, compressed properly, and on SSD RAIDs :-P
Of course not, this is slashdot.
Email wasn't down 23% of the time, the quote is "When it was all said and done, in the first 40 days of the administration we were down 23% of the time", referring to ALL systems, not just email.
That said, read to the end to learn of one of the new, high-tech applications in the White House:
"a printer dashboard to tell them when a printer was running out of toner"
AMAZING!!!!
Not like that is something any moron could whip together in 30 minutes with nagios,
I recently took over for a staff which had been interned in their positions for the better part of a decade. Out with the old in-house staff, in with the new outsourced IT 'team'.
I can easily see how this happens, outside procurement and ineptitude problems on the part of the previous WH IT staff. When you've got what amounts to 'institutional knowledge death', with the institution carrying on, you've got to over-staff for some time or things fall apart completely while you play catch up. With a situation where you don't understand it all, are under staffed or under skilled, you're faced with only a couple options when you come in behind the curve, with aging equipment and software: you either start replacing everything you can, as you are able, as quick as you can, or you start suffering outages. It's even worse if things are mismanaged and things are failing all around you.
As for the claims of the article? Meh. I'm actually not that impressed by his claims to the poitn where I think 'this is bad':
In 2008, "floppy drives" weren't all that uncommon. I remember servicing Core machines which had floppy drives, still. We're not talking biege boxes with ISA slots here, necessarily - with a 4 year replacement schedule for desktops, floppy drives don't speak of ineptitude.
The 80-hour-week thing means nothing. It might mean he was understaffed, or that he's a workaholic. To me, it sounds like the meaningless words of a political appointee.
"Over 82% of the White House technology had reached end of life" means nothing. If they were on a 3-year replacement schedule for desktops and they had 10/100 switching, I can easily see where you'd come to that number.
He had one "data center", with no redundancy. A bit of a contradiction, yeah? This is made somewhat less impressive by the fact that this administration, in particular, was a bunch of Nancys when they came in with "oh woes, look at this mess", quite obviously overstating things for dramatic media effect.
"Our email servers went down for 21 hours" isn't a statement of disaster, it's a statement of ineptitude. If they got the mail servers back up, with the data intact, the problem wasn't with the environment but the people involved (or the lack of staffing). His BB starting to have mail incoming suggests a reinstall wasn't required, so safe to say BES was OK, so who knows what the real 'problem' was which caused a day of outage...
Sorry, I've got a very thin skin when it comes to management making any sort of technical claim. They're usually about 50% lie, and of the remaining 50% truth, only about 1/5th of that is factual with the rest being augmented by misunderstanding, disillusions of grandeur, and over-simplification to pull up the full 100%. Realize that a) this is a political appointee talking, b) it's a seemingly non-technical manager (he's up in his datacenter, lookin' for redundancy!), and c) this is the government we're talking about, after all. Anyone who's had any dealings with them on a technical level realizes that 'setbacks' and 'shortcomings' or 'difficult problems' or the like are (probably!) due to ineptitude. Yes, sadly, even amongst the elite (though not necessarily of their own doing - thank you bureaucratic bullshit).
Granted, this may not have been the case when BO came to the WH and took over. They may have had previous IT staffers who stayed through the transition, but I'm guessing they did not (due to political mistrust issues). It could've been a genuine clusterfuck. Sometimes it's nothing and people cry about the sky falling as they pull down the curtain; sometimes, it really is bad. (If you understand weather patterns, you may recognize a summer storm to not be the disaster that chicken little claims...)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
If only Condi Rice had gotten around to the bin Laden memo, 9/11 could have been prevented. But the documents loaded too slowly for her to get to it in time.
The intern convinced Colangelo that there was a great need for automation.
WTF did he think computers were for before that little piece of enlightenment hit him?
I really hope that was just some random idiot fluff from author of TFA and not an actual sentiment from someone with "Information" in their job title.
.: Semper Absurda
he ever touched the 'real' computers the Bush admin used.
Who else remembers the issues http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/04/bush-lost-e-mails.ars when the Bush's administration replaced the system, Lotus Notes, that the Clinton administration had been running with MS Outlook and Exchange. Then conveniently couldn't recover/find email messages. To give them their due, the Government Records Act does put some strong requirements on any email system being used. Its just that Exchange wasn't up to the task.
Oh wait....
"Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago."
Rahm Emanuel has few redeeming virtues and deserved that fitting computer he got. He too had reached his end that the White House, no too soon enough, however. Floppy, Rahm? Memory? Nah...
>> Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. And all keyboards were missing the W.
Facts take all of the premium out of arm waving - T. Reynolds
At least all the keyboards still had the "W" key!
Ken
Apparently their systems are from the 1990s which was, in retrospect, the worst decade to buy any kind of IT equipment. Imagine they had some Unix system with VT100 terminals. This would have given them an easy upgrade path. They could have made simple and secure ways to remotely login, plus they could have simply replaced the system with a more modern Linux system, etc...
From what I've read, there's only one firm that does White House transitions. I think it's Bechtel, but it's been so long that I've read anything about transitions that I have around a 15% confidence level in that piece of data.
Google "white house transition" and you'll see that it's a total mess. If you want to read about it, there's info here:
http://whitehousetransitionproject.org/
From what little I've read, you basically get a mostly empty building (the White House). It's up to the team to build/rebuild the infrastructure...but as any operations person knows, IT infrastructure is usually way behind everything else. The general executive branch IT has been a low priority for decades. What's more important, email or setting up the phone so the president can call someone (or someone can call the president)?
At that point, the team is probably so far behind that they're screwed continuously for the one or two terms.
Are the guys running the systems any good? I'd ask you: how many of you could pass a background and attitude check? You think the process etc at your workplace is bad, imagine how bad it is in the Executive branch.
That said, it might be fun...but it's probably a nightmare. "I can't print out this $15 billion dollar appropriation because the f*cking printer doesn't work!" "People in PA are starving because the email server ate all of our emails!"
Every minute is a crisis, with everyone breathing down your neck 24/7. Does that sound like something you'd want to do for 24/7/365/4 years?
Well that was a very disorganized, poorly paced retelling of what was probably an interesting talk.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/02/11/
http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/feb/14/white-house-using-open-atrium/
www.openatrium.com
For civilians trying to avoid another HBGary-type SQL-injection cascading breach, building a PHP website using the Drupal framework means benefiting from the eyeballs that watch sites like whitehouse.gov, and others. These same eyeballs, and many others contribute their security patches back to drupal.org. Although I imagine their OpenAtrium groupware is behind a firewall.
OpenAtrium is 100% free open-source server software, that reaches out really well to tables and other mobile devices too.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
""In the first 40 days of President Barack Obama's administration, the White House email system was down 23% of time, according to White House CIO Brook Colangelo, the person who also delivered the 'first presidential Blackberry.' The White House IT systems inherited by the new administration were in bad shape. Over 82% of the White House's technology had reached its end of life. Desktops, for instance, still had floppy disk drives, including the one Colangelo delivered to Rahm Emanuel, Obama's then chief of staff and now Mayor of Chicago. There were no redundant email servers.""
So......I'm guessing no Crysis 2 then? Geez. I can run it with everything cranked.
I would deploy IBM Domino like in the days of Clinton, which Bush switched to Microsoft Exchange. Reliability went downhill with that decision.
Domino runs cheap and fast and reliable. And has always active clustering so you don't have to deal with downtime. IBM simply has a much longer track record of delivering reliable computing than Microsoft.
They should follow the example of Sarah Palin and use Yahoo Mail.
I can picture Kim Jong-un calling the helpdesk: "please add leaderofthefreeworld61@yahoo.com on my trusted recipients list, we almost initiated a nuclear holocaust because I missed an important message in my junk mail folder".
lucm, indeed.
stupid Libtards, still playing Blame It On Bush
... the day you find you're out of IPv4 addresses, and all your systems are not IPv6 ready, in spite of it being a government initiative to have all systems IPv6 ready by this year.
Then again, it's not actually hooked up. It's in there to block a bay in the front so there isn't a big hole. (The case on this PC build is more than a few years old and I didn't have the plastic panel to block that bay and I was too cheap to actually buy one online.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
My favorite part:
Screw the professionals, interns inherit the future even in White House.
You HAVE TO spend money on IT infrastructure and equipment yearly. I don't care what you think, Us in IT know a shitload more about IT than you even pretend to think you know. You hired us experts, why the hell don't you let us do our job?
Honestly, the White house is a small scale IT setup, why the hell dont they have a 2 year replacement on everything there? IT could be done for less than the floor cleaning expenses they have yearly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
There wasn't money in the IT budget to hire professional software engineers. Instead, they created a program to hire computer science savvy interns to work on the project.
There's not much to comment on that quote, really. I'm certainly not one of those USA-haters, but as an IT professional, when I read such a thing, I sincerely hope their whole intern-built systems crash on them in the worst possible moment. The president of the (probably still) most powerful nation on earth has its IT done by interns? What kind of example does that set? They deserve a lesson for that.
"I hear there's rumors on the Internets that we're going to have a draft." —second presidential debate, St. Louis, Mo., Oct. 8, 2004
... shows the same level of competence administering its IT operation as it does running the country.
Anyone who's spent significant time working around the federal government knows that they keep old equipment around much longer than anyone would expect. Simple example, In the '80s, I worked on an Air Force system that still had a punch card reader. It's not uncommon to find this kind of silliness even today. Reminds me of the cassette player on my new '03 Infiniti...needed that like tits on a bull.
Just another day in Paradise
I can't believe corporate America is still on a 3-4 year replacement cycle.
I own a small (~$2M/year) IT business in Philadelphia (posting AC because I don't want it to be a slashvertisement), and we use a 7 year replacement cycle for Desktops. How do we do it? We don't buy piece of shit proprietary desktops from Dell. We build our own workstations out of commodity hardware that can actually be upgraded as software gets more bloated.
Nothing architecturally amazing happens in 3 years that justifies a magical need for a new PC. The only thing that happens in 3 years is that MS comes out with a new version of Office or there some new engineering tool that needs more RAM.
Worse comes to worst, we have a video production company that needs bigger hard drives. No problem. You don't have to replace a PC to get more hard disk space.
I built my office workstation in 2005. It's an AMD Socket 939 dual-core machine with 4GB of DDR. It is 100% sufficient for everything I need a PC for. The only thing that has changed is the addition of more RAM and an upgrade to Windows 7. I haven't come remotely close to filling up the original 320GB hard disk.
This whole notion of the 3 year replacement cycle was invented by "Dell partner" IT outsourcing firms to sell more PCs and get more kickbacks from Dell. That's all there is to it. We have Dell people annoying us almost every month it seems offering us commissions, kickbacks, and bribes to sell their garbage to our clients, advertising the "revenue-generating" 3 year replacement cycle.
It's ludicrous.
This article is partially correct but leaves out the actual technical issues involved.
Someone *from* that Datacenter here at that time. Here's what really happened.
The old administration did not care about the existing IT infrastructure because they were on their way out. They wanted no changes made- just that things be left up. Yes the email system was old and past EOL, but the outages were really the perfect storm of everything that could hit the fan actually hitting the fan at the same time.
The facility was doing work on the power system- the UPS to be specific. Somewhere along the line they messed up, and cut the power. *All* of the power. Datacenter goes dark. They brought the power back up, but then tripped it again before bringing it up for good. This detail is what caused the weekend of hell.
The SAN that the clustered email servers (yes, clustered, they *were* redundant) had the stores on was an EMC Symmetrix. It has a built-in battery backup system so that if the SAN looses power it has enough stored to flush the cache to disk. The power going off started this process. The power going back on triggered the response to stop flushing the cache and start checking and rebuilding. Then the power went off again. This is the part where the specific details get hazy but in effect the SAN did not like this. I don't believe it had enough power to totally flush the cache and/or it did not have the logic built in to handle an outage while in recovery mode. The result was a downed SAN that *would not come back up*. Now all of the data was down and nothing could be done but wait for the vendor to show up and try to fix it.
At the same time we were dealing with *every* server being off and having to come back up. There were hundreds. Luckily most did. Some did not. Some were important, such as in the case of *both* the servers in a clustered system that would not boot- which just so happened to be the system that some of the say "more important" VIPs were on. These were old systems running Exchange 2000 on Windows 2000. Long past due, but kept up by the staff since the EOP would not approve a new email infrastructure.
Eventually the systems would be restored and everything would be back on-line. In the meantime though Brook thought it would be a good idea to spend untold amounts of money to bring in MS Engineers to look things. They cost a lot of money and made a bunch of reports but they didn't fix a damn thing. The staff that was already there found the issues with the servers and fixed them.
There were later headaches, such as when mentioned that the Sonnet was cut (thanks Verizon!) and further SAN maintenance but that was the weekend from hell.
Things to note:
The average lifespan of a computer is 3 years.
6 months if you're a tech. 7 years if you're a technophobe.
I am John Hurt.
If the refers to the first 40 days of the Obama administration, isn't the pre-existing equipment and network setup a reflection on the Bush administration's blunt edge grasp of technology?
Someone tried to deny one party had control of all three branches of gov't for six years: um, how old are you? The answer is the Republicans.
Someone else tried to blame the procurement system. Then you're suggesting that the Obama administration improved it by orders of magnitude, since all of this has been upgraded, and there's a second, redundant datacenter in three years flat.
Meanwhile, when was the last time we had a real, big leap forward in technology coming out of the US? No, smartphones don't count. One big reason: companies, esp. these days, do *not* do basic research, only incremental advances on what there is now - the other stuff doesn't show increase in ROI this quarter; meanwhile, the Republicans gut scientific research budgets.
mark
Given how everything else that Bush left Obama with was a total disaster, no surprise that the White House email was a mess too.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
He is not a CIO he is a firefighter. I have seen many companies like this and thier network infrastructure is built on a pile of dominos.
But it's a government job and he ain't leaving anytime soon.
Nothing will change until a catastrophic event happens and then he will be the fall guy.
Come to think of it, those systems are probably more secure and "less likely" to be able to broadcast, share, or socialize with newer devices.
Makes sense too, since Bush II was about as bright as a 1/2 W light bulb, and PC to him only meant politically correct (and also because he sucked at spelling)
"Doing one thing well" sounds great on paper until you realize what that really means in this context...
Either you'll have multiple address books/sets of contacts (you'll need one for each different application, one for email, one for calendaring, one for collaboration,) or you integrate that function between them all. Both are horrendous pains in the ass, unless the servers are written to work together in the first place. ...But if they are, you're suddenly "locked in" to using only products that are all compatible with each other. Of course, if any part of that integration breaks (likely, if the applications involved weren't written to work together in the first place, and you had to "improvise" a solution to make that happen) all the apps lose their contacts function at once. So we're back to multiple sets of contacts, and "one-tiny-failure" breaking all these functions.
And you'd have to have an account on each of these separate servers, permissions on all of them... Somebody would have to know how all five platforms work (instead of having just one Exchange admin,) and have monitoring capabilities configured correctly. That's another thing: Does XYZ Calendar App support your monitoring tool? Your backup platform? If not, better be prepared for some pissed off co-workers when it crashes overnight and you don't know that's happened until you arrive at the office the next day. Or better be prepared to find another job if your backup solution's support for it is limited, and you restore a "backup" that brings back the functionality while losing all the data.
I mean, if you really think that is "simple" then more power to you... I mean, it is your career, after all... But your co-workers and bosses will laugh you out of your job if you seriously propose this "model" which would turn the entire business' concept of productivity on its ear, since they almost certainly currently use Exchange and Outlook for productivity apps, and every single user would have to re-learn everything they currently know to make your "simple" solution work. My guess? You'd be fired before lunch the first day this "solution" went live, as angry people from the parts of your company that generate profit as opposed to just spending money on personal technology wish lists line up outside your boss' office to decry your insane, not-compatible-with-how-we-do-business decisions.
Not to mention the lynching you'd get for breaking everybody's Android/iToys integration to their work productivity apps, since those functions on both platforms rely on ActiveSync, which isn't available anywhere but Microsoft platforms.
Who did what now?
I'd lose my job if email was down for a day or two even if the data centre burnt to the ground. It appears that with MS Exchange I could instead blame the software and keep my job.
Still, it's far better than it used to be - you can actually do proper backups of all mailboxes in MS Exchange now without shutting half the thing down! Also virtual machines make it easier to keep the mail running when the thing crashes, which I've heard doesn't happen anywhere near as much anymore.
Yes, 23% was some sort of idiot troll, but the thing is still a shambolic heap that's very name is a warning to swap it for something else. Google gets a pile of business simply because they provide something that MS Exchange should have been over a decade ago - but it's the MTA part that really lets the side down with MS Exchange. It's as if it's abandonware from 1999.
Worst work day maybe, I can see that. But worst day ever? While some folks have sadly experienced their worst day while at work (think of your own examples, I have mine) I suspect the majority of us experienced the worst day ever in our personal lives. Of course, I don't view the WH tech infrastructure the most important thing in life. Which may explain why I don't work directly for the government anymore.
The only reason I draw this distinction is (not because I read TFA), I wonder if most political appointees (and politicians for that matter) increasingly come from well-connected, sheltered and privileged backgrounds where nothing bad ever really happens.
Perspective matters.
An IT department is specificly designed to suck when you put somebody that walked out on graduation day into the position of VP of a Bank and then didn't touch anything related to IT until given control of the White House IT department. Such a thing is not an accident. Incompetance perhaps, but very deliberate incompetance.
The person in question now works for a data recovery company after such an epic failure as the lost emails. The message that sends to me is that is you abolutely want inconvenient documentation to vanish you hire that company.
A lot of agencies, even now STILL use XP. I know of at least one agency that STILL uses Lotus NOTES! 2001 called, they want their OS back.