Most American Airlines lounges have T-Mobile service in them. I was suprised when I fired up the laptop at Logan to see some strange provider's login screen while attempting to use T-Mobile. Turns out that AA had to install Ethernet jacks everywhere in the loungs just for this same reason.
Massport wouldn't let AA put in their own network, even if it was T-Mobile.
Yup... NMCSD has had the cart robots for a long time... I used to work IT there, got out last year. The nice thing about having an IT badge and all the keys was that you could go all over the complex and no one said anthing. There are lots of interesting places on the compound!
Those tunnels are kinda creepy when no one else is around and the robots are just moving around by themselves in the dark. They now have newer ones that don't depend on the track, and can go directly onto the wards in the nursing tower instead of the central core.
The new PACS system there by the way (was well as on the USNS Mercy) is sweet.
Isn't this exactly what products such as EMC's Centera were designed for?
No, I don't work for EMC, but I have worked with the Centera... it does the job well.
The 10 bucks gets you everything except Playboy, which is about 100 channels. Not really sure why you would want Playboy *radio*, but whatever.
Anyway, there are no packages or other such deals. It's all included.
1) DISA ATM switches - the switches I am talking about are NOT DISA controlled. They are connected to DISA Marconi switches, which are on site beacuse DISA provides our DS3 NIPRnet service. Connected to that was a locally controlled, locally provided ATM switch. We would turn that off, for whatever reason, and we would get a call from DISA ATM, and instead of leaving enough alone (i.e. "We needed to do maintenance, we know it's down") we have to endure a 15 minute diatribe from a guy that has NO clue as to what we are doing... never mind that we had redundancy in place, so the link never really went down, and that this is all CLIENT SIDE, NON DISA EQUIPMENT.
2) WAN - This is in San Diego, so all of our needs are through NCTS San Diego, save the DS3 to NIPRnet. This involves T1 and the SONET ring we ride. We had more than a few circuits provided directly from PacBell, mostly for VTC. Very little DISA involvement, save the NIPRnet feed. We control everything riding the WAN, save the NIPRnet feed out... if you doubt that, come down to SD and I will show you. DISA has NO visibility into our network save the before mentioned ATM switches. Why? Because they don't own it. Claimancy 18 of the Navy does. This is a command with an internal WAN with OC-12 in, connecting 12 remote sites at OC-3 and 8 more on T1 on the San Diego Base Area Network, run by NCTS San Diego and RITSC. While NIPRnet is cool and all, it is not the core of our network.
3) LAN - Absolutely NO DISA involvement. Done deal. It's locally run, locally procured, and locally designed. DISA inspections? Haven't done a SINGLE one. We have our own rigors we go thru provided by organizations such as TIMPO and CITPO, both "Tri-Service" agencies (Army, Navy, Air Force). The LAN at this command is CRITICAL to business operations... without it was cannot function effectively. It has multiple layers of redudancy that is among the most state of the art that I have seen in the Navy or Marines. If the LAN goes down, we stop. Believe me that the WAN going down would be a pain in the ass, but not NEARLY as bad as the LAN dying at the central campus we have. I am not talking about e-mail or other office drivel. I am talking about critial applications that need high speed low latency access to the network.
4) SAN Solutions????? Where did this come from? We have had a 7 TB SAN sitting in the Data Center for 3 years now that was designed by a partership with Dell, EMC, and the local command here.... who runs it you ask? We do. Not NMCI, not DISA, us.
Maybe you are referring to the relationships DISA has with other branches of the military, or maybe even other sections of the Navy. However, I think you place DISA in a much higher light that it really is at my local level. The only dependence we have on DISA is to provide our NIPRnet, and to be a pain in the ass when we need new local circuits, and insist we go thru them, only to get a waiver 3 months later that says otherwise because it's cheaper not to.
My two cents... remember that the military is a HUGE organazation, and no 2 commands are the same... what may be true here may not be the same as, say, just picking one.... Scott AFB.
Well, if you actually knew what you were talking about, this might have been a cool post.
I am coming from the Navy perspective, so your mileage may vary, but DISA control very little about what goes on inside the DoN networks. They provide WAN circuits to connect point A to point B. Basically a glorified Bell. They don't manage LANS, don't manage the traffic on the WAN, etc. When even the smallest thing goes wrong on your side of their ATM network (turn off ATM switch, for example) they call and whine at you, and keep asking questions until you basically hang up on them.
It's another govmt red tape disaster that has *no* say on the internal workings of the military LAN.
To be technically correct, it's two 1 TB store DBs on 2 RAID 5 containers on 2 clustered machines (Dell 8450s). Users don't know the difference, however. It was Dell/EMC that told us to do that, due to SAN storage array and Win2K issues. No one could give us particulars, just that it "wasn't recommended". That's fine, as long as it works. Just adds more to the point that if you have the right people running it on the right hardware, it just works with minimal hassle.
Hmm, we do the same thing.... and our info store is 2TB. Not Large enough? You are going to hit filesystem limits, and Exchange 2000 lets you have multiple info stores anyway. We have public folders for all sorts of things, from shared calendars to our Patient Service line (I work in a hospital) storing voice recordings of phone calls. Why, do you ask? Simple, you can search not only the subject line, but the full body of messages. There are third party snap-ins that let you search the text of attachments, too.
You need more storage, or an archiving solution, check out something like EMC's Centera system.
You mention High Overhead, but I am not sure what kind of overhead you are talking about. As far as saving each message seperately, you shouldn't ever have to do that. Just copy the message to the exhange public folder, and voila! it's there. Need a new Public Folder? Right click, choose "New Folder", and assign permissions for users.
If this doesn't meet your needs as a groupware suite, what features are you looking for? Maybe someone can point you to one that would fit.
And Outlook/Exchange works with *all* of those standards above (except the web forums, the public folders portion of exchange is the answer, and it does have a "dumb" mode). Here is the point that everyone seems to be missing... Outlook integrates it all into a really easy to use, and (suprisingly) intuitive interface. I have been using Outlook 2002 (aka XP) for almost a year now, and I am surpised almost every day how well they have tied my calendar, journal, e-mail, and contacts all together. If you really haven't seen and worked with it, they have really cleaned it up from the last version (2000).
It can be a real timesaver when I need to create a meeting for all the people on an e-mail string, even those on outside e-mail systems (iCal), or have to look up someone in the Global Address List (works much better in Exchange than LDAP mode).
Granted, to use most of these really cool features you have to be running Exchange, However, most features are functional on IMAP and LDAP servers. It just doesn't look and work as pretty as a native exchange install. Once you start pulling these functions apart into different programs, you really start losing functionality. I am not saying everything on your computer should be in one huge mega-application, but these are all related functions that give you a one-stop shop with a clean consistent interface.
Like most people here, if there was an OSS replacement, I would consider it, but we are part of a HUGE Exchange site (US Navy), and we have to have replication and so on. Interoperability is a must, and to be honest, there isn't a package out there that even comes close to matching the feature set and manageability of Exchange/Outlook.
Other side notes.....
changing permissions on folders you own (such as calendars and what not) is really easy for users. They just right click, choose Properties, and choose who can see, change, add, etc. I haven't seen anything like that in the OSS world, and is a MAJOR thing, at least in my corner of the world.
Excryption, using PKI certs is a piece of cake, public keys are stored in the GAL, so I don't even need to get it ahead of time. Outlook checks every message, warns of bad certs and sigs, the whole deal. User can be brain-dead, but still send mostly secure e-mail.
I can choose the format of my e-mails (plain, RTF, HTML) and base that on the destination, so that I send plain out on the internet, RTF within the exchange site, and HTML to local addressees, etc.
Ties in with Windows messenger and NetMeeting, so I can click the name on en e-mail and talk to and see someone, using all internal servers, no MSN or any of that crap. Shared whiteboard? No problem. Shared Desktop? Ditto.
Exchange hosts IRC conferences, that can be scheduled via Outlook, and accessed by any IRC client out there.
Those are just off the top of my head. IMO Outlook/Exchange is the best software MS has, especially the latest versions. We haven't had a server crash or DB corruption (with 7,000 users and 2 TB info store) in over a year and a half, and when we did, it was because the SAN died, not exchange. If you have people that know what they are doing running exchange on good non-bargain-basement hardware, it works well and just runs. It's managed by *one* MMC snap-in tool to control all the protocols, stores, folders, etc.
That's my $.02......
Again, people need to RTFA. These chat rooms are NOT on AOL, MSN, undernet, or god knows what else. They are on secure systems that are NOT connected to the internet, and the people that are in them ARE people who can give advice.
Trust me, as f**ked up as the military is, giving away free intelligence to the enemy and creating unsecure systems are issues we are extremely paranoid about. All of these systems are ran thru very good, very classified encryption devices.
I always hate it when a SIPRNET/GCCS/JMCIS/NTDS/whatever story shows up because people love to flood/. with assumptions about how things are really running when they don't have a clue. Don't let your faith in military communications technology instantly evaporate because an end user is talking about "Microsoft Chat". Instead read the article! In it right there, they are talking about "rows of Sun Servers"... hmmmm, last time I checked, Windows did not run on UltraSparcs. Almost ALL tactical systems used by the military (At least USN and USMC, where my experience lays) are UNIX based.
Slashdot Mirror
Most American Airlines lounges have T-Mobile service in them. I was suprised when I fired up the laptop at Logan to see some strange provider's login screen while attempting to use T-Mobile. Turns out that AA had to install Ethernet jacks everywhere in the loungs just for this same reason. Massport wouldn't let AA put in their own network, even if it was T-Mobile.
Wow... this story was only posted about 2 hours ago. Slashdot reposting is reaching an all-time high in efficiency!
Yup... NMCSD has had the cart robots for a long time... I used to work IT there, got out last year. The nice thing about having an IT badge and all the keys was that you could go all over the complex and no one said anthing. There are lots of interesting places on the compound! Those tunnels are kinda creepy when no one else is around and the robots are just moving around by themselves in the dark. They now have newer ones that don't depend on the track, and can go directly onto the wards in the nursing tower instead of the central core. The new PACS system there by the way (was well as on the USNS Mercy) is sweet.
Isn't this exactly what products such as EMC's Centera were designed for? No, I don't work for EMC, but I have worked with the Centera... it does the job well.
The 10 bucks gets you everything except Playboy, which is about 100 channels. Not really sure why you would want Playboy *radio*, but whatever. Anyway, there are no packages or other such deals. It's all included.
1) DISA ATM switches - the switches I am talking about are NOT DISA controlled. They are connected to DISA Marconi switches, which are on site beacuse DISA provides our DS3 NIPRnet service. Connected to that was a locally controlled, locally provided ATM switch. We would turn that off, for whatever reason, and we would get a call from DISA ATM, and instead of leaving enough alone (i.e. "We needed to do maintenance, we know it's down") we have to endure a 15 minute diatribe from a guy that has NO clue as to what we are doing... never mind that we had redundancy in place, so the link never really went down, and that this is all CLIENT SIDE, NON DISA EQUIPMENT.
2) WAN - This is in San Diego, so all of our needs are through NCTS San Diego, save the DS3 to NIPRnet. This involves T1 and the SONET ring we ride. We had more than a few circuits provided directly from PacBell, mostly for VTC. Very little DISA involvement, save the NIPRnet feed. We control everything riding the WAN, save the NIPRnet feed out... if you doubt that, come down to SD and I will show you. DISA has NO visibility into our network save the before mentioned ATM switches. Why? Because they don't own it. Claimancy 18 of the Navy does. This is a command with an internal WAN with OC-12 in, connecting 12 remote sites at OC-3 and 8 more on T1 on the San Diego Base Area Network, run by NCTS San Diego and RITSC. While NIPRnet is cool and all, it is not the core of our network.
3) LAN - Absolutely NO DISA involvement. Done deal. It's locally run, locally procured, and locally designed. DISA inspections? Haven't done a SINGLE one. We have our own rigors we go thru provided by organizations such as TIMPO and CITPO, both "Tri-Service" agencies (Army, Navy, Air Force). The LAN at this command is CRITICAL to business operations... without it was cannot function effectively. It has multiple layers of redudancy that is among the most state of the art that I have seen in the Navy or Marines. If the LAN goes down, we stop. Believe me that the WAN going down would be a pain in the ass, but not NEARLY as bad as the LAN dying at the central campus we have. I am not talking about e-mail or other office drivel. I am talking about critial applications that need high speed low latency access to the network.
4) SAN Solutions????? Where did this come from? We have had a 7 TB SAN sitting in the Data Center for 3 years now that was designed by a partership with Dell, EMC, and the local command here.... who runs it you ask? We do. Not NMCI, not DISA, us.
Maybe you are referring to the relationships DISA has with other branches of the military, or maybe even other sections of the Navy. However, I think you place DISA in a much higher light that it really is at my local level. The only dependence we have on DISA is to provide our NIPRnet, and to be a pain in the ass when we need new local circuits, and insist we go thru them, only to get a waiver 3 months later that says otherwise because it's cheaper not to.
My two cents... remember that the military is a HUGE organazation, and no 2 commands are the same... what may be true here may not be the same as, say, just picking one.... Scott AFB.
Well, if you actually knew what you were talking about, this might have been a cool post. I am coming from the Navy perspective, so your mileage may vary, but DISA control very little about what goes on inside the DoN networks. They provide WAN circuits to connect point A to point B. Basically a glorified Bell. They don't manage LANS, don't manage the traffic on the WAN, etc. When even the smallest thing goes wrong on your side of their ATM network (turn off ATM switch, for example) they call and whine at you, and keep asking questions until you basically hang up on them. It's another govmt red tape disaster that has *no* say on the internal workings of the military LAN.
Admiral Grace Hopper really was an amazing woman. Born in 1906, she didn't fit ANY of the stereotypes for geeks. Active Duty Navy, oldest on active duty, created COBOL... Check out the following links....m w it.html
http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/hopper.ht
http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/hopper-
Truly Amazing!
To be technically correct, it's two 1 TB store DBs on 2 RAID 5 containers on 2 clustered machines (Dell 8450s). Users don't know the difference, however. It was Dell/EMC that told us to do that, due to SAN storage array and Win2K issues. No one could give us particulars, just that it "wasn't recommended". That's fine, as long as it works. Just adds more to the point that if you have the right people running it on the right hardware, it just works with minimal hassle.
You need more storage, or an archiving solution, check out something like EMC's Centera system.
You mention High Overhead, but I am not sure what kind of overhead you are talking about. As far as saving each message seperately, you shouldn't ever have to do that. Just copy the message to the exhange public folder, and voila! it's there. Need a new Public Folder? Right click, choose "New Folder", and assign permissions for users.
If this doesn't meet your needs as a groupware suite, what features are you looking for? Maybe someone can point you to one that would fit.
It can be a real timesaver when I need to create a meeting for all the people on an e-mail string, even those on outside e-mail systems (iCal), or have to look up someone in the Global Address List (works much better in Exchange than LDAP mode).
Granted, to use most of these really cool features you have to be running Exchange, However, most features are functional on IMAP and LDAP servers. It just doesn't look and work as pretty as a native exchange install. Once you start pulling these functions apart into different programs, you really start losing functionality. I am not saying everything on your computer should be in one huge mega-application, but these are all related functions that give you a one-stop shop with a clean consistent interface.
Like most people here, if there was an OSS replacement, I would consider it, but we are part of a HUGE Exchange site (US Navy), and we have to have replication and so on. Interoperability is a must, and to be honest, there isn't a package out there that even comes close to matching the feature set and manageability of Exchange/Outlook.
Other side notes..... changing permissions on folders you own (such as calendars and what not) is really easy for users. They just right click, choose Properties, and choose who can see, change, add, etc. I haven't seen anything like that in the OSS world, and is a MAJOR thing, at least in my corner of the world.
Excryption, using PKI certs is a piece of cake, public keys are stored in the GAL, so I don't even need to get it ahead of time. Outlook checks every message, warns of bad certs and sigs, the whole deal. User can be brain-dead, but still send mostly secure e-mail.
I can choose the format of my e-mails (plain, RTF, HTML) and base that on the destination, so that I send plain out on the internet, RTF within the exchange site, and HTML to local addressees, etc.
Ties in with Windows messenger and NetMeeting, so I can click the name on en e-mail and talk to and see someone, using all internal servers, no MSN or any of that crap. Shared whiteboard? No problem. Shared Desktop? Ditto.
Exchange hosts IRC conferences, that can be scheduled via Outlook, and accessed by any IRC client out there.
Those are just off the top of my head. IMO Outlook/Exchange is the best software MS has, especially the latest versions. We haven't had a server crash or DB corruption (with 7,000 users and 2 TB info store) in over a year and a half, and when we did, it was because the SAN died, not exchange. If you have people that know what they are doing running exchange on good non-bargain-basement hardware, it works well and just runs. It's managed by *one* MMC snap-in tool to control all the protocols, stores, folders, etc. That's my $.02......
Trust me, as f**ked up as the military is, giving away free intelligence to the enemy and creating unsecure systems are issues we are extremely paranoid about. All of these systems are ran thru very good, very classified encryption devices.
I always hate it when a SIPRNET/GCCS/JMCIS/NTDS/whatever story shows up because people love to flood /. with assumptions about how things are really running when they don't have a clue. Don't let your faith in military communications technology instantly evaporate because an end user is talking about "Microsoft Chat". Instead read the article! In it right there, they are talking about "rows of Sun Servers"... hmmmm, last time I checked, Windows did not run on UltraSparcs. Almost ALL tactical systems used by the military (At least USN and USMC, where my experience lays) are UNIX based.