First off, thanks for writing this. I used to be the lead of the UNIX admin team at FERMILAB quite a few years ago. The people who've been writing all this drivel need to remember that FERMI has fewer "secrets" to hide from people than just about any small business has. Oh they have a lot of stuff that one team of scientists would just as soon the others didnt' see till they publish it, but nothing classified.
As to taking over the accelerator (lets just ignore the fact that the Hadron collider is on a different continent and not running yet) - You've obviously never watched a whole bunch of particle physicists spend a week trying to get something resembling a usable beam out of the accelerator. It's not like there's a "destroy the world" button on a web site. And trust me, that stuff isn't Internet accessible.
I also don't think that people understand that computer security at a site of this type is a continual battle over the security=1/convenience rule. The physicist-users want convenience. The computing staff wants security - it's pretty much like anywhere else. I was still having arguments with experimenters who didn't want to have passwords while I was there. I'm sure it's only somewhat better now.
You have to remember that FERMILAB is much more like a graduate school in many ways than it is a secure classified site.
That's because you're using the Red Hat repositories. Which are constantly swamped. I've written a FAQ about fixing this at http://www.fedorazine.com/content/view/77/38/
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First off, thanks for writing this. I used to be the lead of the UNIX admin team at FERMILAB quite a few years ago. The people who've been writing all this drivel need to remember that FERMI has fewer "secrets" to hide from people than just about any small business has. Oh they have a lot of stuff that one team of scientists would just as soon the others didnt' see till they publish it, but nothing classified.
As to taking over the accelerator (lets just ignore the fact that the Hadron collider is on a different continent and not running yet) - You've obviously never watched a whole bunch of particle physicists spend a week trying to get something resembling a usable beam out of the accelerator. It's not like there's a "destroy the world" button on a web site. And trust me, that stuff isn't Internet accessible.
I also don't think that people understand that computer security at a site of this type is a continual battle over the security=1/convenience rule. The physicist-users want convenience. The computing staff wants security - it's pretty much like anywhere else. I was still having arguments with experimenters who didn't want to have passwords while I was there. I'm sure it's only somewhat better now.
You have to remember that FERMILAB is much more like a graduate school in many ways than it is a secure classified site.
That's because you're using the Red Hat repositories. Which are constantly swamped. I've written a FAQ about fixing this at
http://www.fedorazine.com/content/view/77/38/