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Why the NSA Can't Replace 90% of Its System Administrators
An anonymous reader writes "Curious about the recently purposed NSA cuts, Courtney Nash explores a few myths about systems automation 'In the aftermath of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA's domestic surveillance activities, the NSA has recently announced that they plan to get rid of 90% of their system administrators via software automation in order to "improve security." So far, I've mostly seen this piece of news reported and commented on straightforwardly. But it simply doesn't add up. Either the NSA has a monumental (yet not necessarily surprising) level of bureaucratic bloat that they could feasibly cut that amount of staff regardless of automation, or they are simply going to be less effective once they've reduced their staff.'"
I have a couple of SAP, Exchange and other Windows servers I have to manage. They don't require any more babysitting that any of the linux boxes do. They're all VMs on Hyper V or Xen or ESX and I worry more about patching the host firmware than anything else.
I work with about 7 Exchange organizations; all deployed as VMs.
Hyper-V is nasty... careful not to get any of that stuff on you.
At any rate; these Windows services DO require more babysitting. Or at least, the admin team gets more "issue reports about them" than regarding any other Linux-based enterprise mail servers --- mostly though, the server works and the Outlook client side has issues, most issues deal with the Junk mail folder, Calendar, Calendar sharing, Public folders, or someone having a 20 gigabyte inbox and crashing Outlook against our strong (but ignored) advise to management to keep inbox quotas below 1gb, and require users to use the archiving system to access their 50gb photo collection, for stability, performance, and disaster recovery reasons: the client software, and the separate AD domain the client is occassionally using is something the Exchange admins have no control of, so all the need to "babysit" the server, is almost always to review (and reject), and lead back to the bright and narrow path --- some clueless beginner Windows server admin's request to allow 2 gigabyte attachments, start changing random Exchange settings, or apply some random registry hack they found on a forum somewhere, etc, etc.
In other words: I'm saying.... Windows servers do have more issues, but they are all the result of user abuse. Often user abuse that is sanctioned by clueless IT admin or management folks. The problem is not the technology: it is the people who are allowed to decide how the technology is used, and admins and users alike relying on hearsay information and not following vendors' formal recommendations.