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Interview: Query Queen Elizabeth II's Webmaster
I e-mailed Mick and requested the inteview, really on a whim, the day we ran this story. To my surprise, unlike U.S. government officials and politicians who typically dither for weeks or months before answering their e-mail if they bother to answer it at all, Mick replied almost immediately with a message that said, in part, "Happy to oblige, if only to put the record straight on a few points. I can see from today's edition that there is a great deal of misunderstanding out there."
We're always happy to set things straight. And getting "the word" directly from the man himself is always better than getting it second-hand from The Sunday Times. So here we are, happily welcoming Mick Morgan to Slashdot.
Mick is a genial fellow, but please don't forget that he is also a highly-placed, trusted government official. He has laid down several necessary interview ground rules. He says, "I will not be drawn on specifics of system security (generalities I will answer at my sole discretion). Nor will I comment on UK Government policies on web usage, architectures etc. But since the questions are likely to be technical rather than policy oriented there should not be a problem."
The usual Slashdot interview rules apply: one question per post; moderators choose the most intriguing ones; editors make the final "cut" Tuesday afternoon; Mick's answers appear Friday.
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Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
What is your background? Are you a techie, an admin person, or an other? Do you use Linux personally? If so, did you come from a Unix, Windows or other background?
And a related question: What is the primary system around your department?
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
Assuming the British Government, and Her Majesty, aware that their public image on the Internet is being presented via software that is non-traditional and non-commercial, what do they think of it all?
Given the infamous traditionalist attitude of the Civil Service (Sir Humphrey Appleby is alive, well and encrypting everything into English), I can see the possibility of some "concerns" being expressed by people who know just enough to be dangerous.
On the other hand, the Civil Service, et al, hire experts to worry about technical issues, so that senior officials don't have to, which would imply that nobody not involved in the decision would know or even care if the web server used Linux or HP Sauce.
On the third hand (a consequence of drinking large quantities of Typhoo :), given the press' love of so-called "cyper-terrorism" escapades, it wouldn't be unsurprising of Her Majesty, or the Rt Hon Tony to march down to the server room, give the senior manager a clip round the lughole, and tell them to shift from Microsoft by yesterday or be fed to the royal corgis.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What kind of redundancy do you build into the server system for such a large and important site,
ie. round-robin style servers or large, beefy superboxes, etc...
Check my Go-related blog for beginners: DGD
If you could add or change three things about Linux to make your job easier or more enjoyable, what would they be?
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QDMerge 0.4!
how to invest, a novice's guide
It was to be 'leet, of course.
How can people thin you're cool if you say you are running OpenBSD, when no one's heard of OpenBSD. Now, everyone's heard about Linux, that's cool.
-Brent--
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Linux vs. Solaris, not just in terms of price, but overall performance, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use. As a developer, I'm seeing Linux considered as an alternative to Solaris in many places, but there's little factual (or even anecdotal) information comparing the two.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Do you get many cracker/script kiddie attacks on the various web sites you run?
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
I notice, for example, that the Scottish Parliament's web site, and my local Council's Web site, do not yet conform. Without wishing to point fingers at specific organisations, is it your intention to cajole all sites within .gov.uk to conform to these standards? Is it appropriate for members of the public to draw administrators of these sites attention to these standards?
Oh, and, by the way, keep up the good work!
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
What other choices, e.g. FreeBSD, did you consider? Were there non-open-source candidates, or was open-source-ness itself a critical feature?
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
To what extent is the Royal Family involved with the site (e.g. content creation)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Seems like a simple question, but why Linux? It seems like all the other high powered sites are using BSD of one variant or another.
thanks!
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
What made you choose linux as opposed to *bsd? From what I've seen of each, bsd would be better to run for security reasons, as I would assume that the server would be under pretty much non-stop cracking attempts, DoS attacks, etc..