It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.
First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was just very resourceful in doing so.
Gedda writes: > IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried > about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking, > according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed. In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore, they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result of our efforts and the decisions that we made.
In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious. Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!" or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go home early anymore!"
In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.
> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems > from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his > judgement.
Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet there's so much more.
> "PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open > source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up > and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad > relationship between our users and IT."
Well it's either replace Windows with Window for Internet facing servers or find a more secure alternative that didn't have to be patched and rebooted so often. Bringing back network and application stability was important to the business as much as increasing security wherever it was possible to do so. I feel that stability is a result of good security.
We concentrated on network perimeter security. Hence anything that was public facing was considered so long as it satisfied
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It's unfortunate that reporters such as this guy would sensationalize a talk by carefully crafting his story from bits and pieces mostly taken out of context. So, in all fairness to my firm and to those who were not present, I feel compelled to set the story straight.
First off, the story is not an interview even though it may come across as such. The title is rather sensational but I certainly wasn't desperate. There were problems and they were fixed and our team was just very resourceful in doing so.
Gedda writes:
> IT managers who want to deploy an open source solution but are worried
> about company politics should go ahead and do it without asking,
> according to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Japan IT manager Mark Uemura.
No, this is taken out of context. What I said was that we had very big and important changes that we needed to make in order to restore network and application stability. My reference to just going ahead and doing it referred to making the necessary changes behind the scenes. It wasn't about company politics and it wasn't about migrating services from Windows to OpenBSD. My experience was that we did ourselves a disfavour by trying to inform and explain to users and management the technical reasons for the changes that needed to be made. In fact, all of the pushback had nothing to do with OpenBSD. We needed to migrate from an old Domain Controller with a corrupt Active Directory to a new one. We also introduced the concept of working on Application Servers in Terminal Services to take advantage of server power for resource intensive applications that ran very slowly on users' PCs. So, the push back was related to things like "you'll have to login to this new Domain rather than the old one from tomorrow onwards." or getting users to change the way they work and use applications running on a Terminal Servers for speed. In the end, when all was sad and done, users and management realized the difference that we had made; no more downtime or data loss. Furthermore, they've never had everything running so smoothly and as efficiently for as long as they could remember. Their IT problems went away as a result of our efforts and the decisions that we made.
In fact, all of the migrations to OpenBSD were either behind the scenes where the users were oblivious to the changes. Well, almost oblivious. Often times we would get "Hey, the Internet is really fast today, cool!" or "Man, can you guys like spill some coffee in the server room or something? We're not used to this much uptime. It means we can't go home early anymore!"
In those cases where users did have to interact with OpenBSD, it was always well received and positive such as moving off of a very slow VPN for remote access on to a quicker and more user friendly alternative such as port forwarding applications through OpenSSH.
> Faced with an unreliable network, Uemura went ahead and migrated systems
> from Windows to OpenBSD on the premise that management would trust his
> judgement.
Once again, migrating services to OpenBSD was not an issue. So long as we did not compromise security in doing so. Generally, we did so to improve security and that's what OpenBSD is famous for and yet there's so much more.
> "PricewaterhouseCoopers is a Windows shop but we were forced to use open
> source," he said. "I inherited a real nightmare with servers going up
> and down. There were e-mail outages and on top of that there was a bad
> relationship between our users and IT."
Well it's either replace Windows with Window for Internet facing servers or find a more secure alternative that didn't have to be patched and rebooted so often. Bringing back network and application stability was important to the business as much as increasing security wherever it was possible to do so. I feel that stability is a result of good security.
We concentrated on network perimeter security. Hence anything that was public facing was considered so long as it satisfied