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The military should evaluate wholesale replacement of spinning hard drives with SSD, rather than replacing many thousands of computers.
I’m impressed with the person that waited over an hour to get into outlook. With determination like that no enemy stands a chance
I'd love to know WHY it takes over an hour to load Outlook? Can anyone enlighten me as to what takes the time? Is it connecting to something and periodically backing off when it can't? Scanning something? What?
Scanning through the replies, I'll also add that if you are loading your entire profile from the network, this often becomes much more problematic than the IT people may have initially calculated, because even if you can transfer a gigabyte in 10 seconds, you can't transfer a gigabyte in 10 seconds to thousands of users simultaneously, and logins are highly temporally correlated. It doesn't take much at all to have a cascading network failure as a result, even under perfect conditions, as that 10 second window becomes a 20 second window, which catches ten more people and it turns into a 40 second window, and it explodes quite fast from there as suddenly everyone everywhere is waiting for minutes or hours to load from the same overloaded profile server(s).
From what I've witnessed of this, what you'll get is a number of these answers operating at once.
I've read sci-fi books that are more realistic than this. Only the wildest cyber-crime novels portray the military network systems and administration ops as competent. When watching "Alias" a long time ago, I had to laugh every time I saw an instantly responding laptop from sleep that basically took 1 second to show a login screen (of course they used Linux so it is actually possible, especially if they picked laptops with good compatibility).
And in light of Spectre/Meltdown and the complete hardware and software security circus that we've been witnessing for years (a new CVE in a popular software on a regular basis, anyone?), I also have my doubts that the military control their physical computer supply chain that well and from "trusted" vendors, but who knows. They love doing it, so that part maybe they got right. Doesn't change the fact that they have thousands of machines that are potentially back-doored on the hardware level, even below ring zero.
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Needless to say I completely agree with the article. Like 1h to just log-in, WTF?! And another 20 minutes to just send an email?!
I have a laptop with a Celeron J4155 CPU and 12GB RAM and a SATA III SSD that starts Manjaro + XFCE in 10-12 seconds. A browser and mail client are fully started and ready to use another 10-15 seconds later. The machine doesn't lag on any of the casual tasks that I do on it, unless I play a 4K YouTube video.
It costed me exactly $170 on the second-hand market, and has a very acceptable 3000x2000 display as well. Maybe the military should look into those laptops.
> She said a service culture of stoically persevering in the face of impossible odds didn’t do anyone any favors. “If we suffer in silence it doesn’t get fixed,” she said. And that's the point where IT should go, run a filter in the inventory list for all models < 2018 and have local IT service desks replace them. If you know your users are of the type to not cause any trouble with IT due to culture, you go the other…
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> Currently the service uses both McAfee and Tanium software packages to scan and protect service-issued endpoints like laptops. The problem isn't hardware, it's that they're using the worst antivirus known to mankind. It's not throwing money at the problem, it's about what can be removed.
The problem is definitely hardware. If you actually read the linked sources, it sounds like the Air Force bought a ton of spinning rust HDD machines in 2018 for the lowest possible price they could. They probably only have 4GB of RAM too, then, given what low end specs were like at the time. Good luck getting anything done today with those specs.
If I recall correctly there was a slew of issues, for one, the certificate on their Exchange server was expired, but more frustratingly, the site he needed to access seemed to use some sort of TLS version or feature that didn’t work in IE. That’d be fine and all, as they worked in other browsers, but what didn’t work in other browsers was the entire interface implemented as a Java Applet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IT departments in large organizations often see their users as adversaries rather than customers. The department's goal isn't to enable productivity but to prevent computing. This is probably WAI.
Sounds like somebody thinks they need root access to the production servers.
The military has the most interesting issues with tech. My brother asked me for help getting to a website to work at one point. If I recall correctly there was a slew of issues, for one, the certificate on their Exchange server was expired, but more frustratingly, the site he needed to access seemed to use some sort of TLS version or feature that didn’t work in IE. That’d be fine and all, as they worked in other brow…
Imagine implementing a new Java Applet today?
The military should evaluate wholesale replacement of spinning hard drives with SSD, rather than replacing many thousands of computers.
The cost of a new laptop is negligible in the grand scheme (~3m employees, 1k per laptop = 3B on a 700B budget) and saves them from a logistical nightmare.
Replacing all the HDDs bij SSD is a perfect example of being 'penny wise but pound foolish'.