back to article Parliament network prang: 'Supplier done it', no Office 365 yet

A botched network upgrade at the Houses of Parliament caused comms bottlenecks, web outages and continuing capacity woes – and could yet delay the full rollout of Office 365 for our lords and masters. Director of Parliamentary ICT Joan Miller emailed staff on 4 March to apologise for the "frustrating and inconvenient" episode …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Office 365? I thought they were dropping all the Microsoft tosh.

    1. Tyrion
      Go

      Tosh indeed

      >Office 365? I thought they were dropping all the Microsoft tosh.

      Governments seem to act like crack addicts when it comes to Microsoft. They just can't seem to wean themselves off them.

      It's clear the problem lies with the procurement process and the fact that Microsoft has a legion of partners (shills really) that they use to bid for government contracts. By comparison, FOSS suppliers are massively outnumbered. A similar tactic was employed while trying to ram through the ridiculously complicated (6k pages by all accounts), proprietary, and patent encumbered OOXML.

    2. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      Office 365?

      Does that mean that our governments documents are to be stored on American servers?

      1. big_D Silver badge

        Re: Office 365?

        Azure for Governments - at least in the USA, they are rolling out Azure clouds that are only held in the USA and only vetted staff can work on the servers.

        I would assume, if the UK government has any sense, they will insist upon the same restrictions, with UK based servers and MI6 vetted employees... Oh, wait, we are talking about the UK government here, so yes, you are probably right, the data will be stored in the USA.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Office 365?

        "Does that mean that our governments documents are to be stored on American servers?"

        You think they aren't already? Probably the NSA has better backups of our government documents than we do...

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      "Office 365? I thought they were dropping all the Microsoft tosh."

      For drones in kiosk type jobs maybe. One would presume that the Houses of Parliament requires a verison of Office that actually works and can seemlessly exchange documents with others. Which rather counts out all of the OSS Office options...

  2. CABVolunteer

    Don't they keep a log of changes?

    "As the estate is used by several thousand people, 'these IT connections and security systems are very complex', and required a 'significant amount of investigative work' to identify the problem."

    If the estate is complex, surely they have a change log procedure in place? Why did it need much investigation? All they had to do was to look at the log for changes made just before the problem started to appear.

    But then the Director of Parliamentary ICT probably has no more trust in what the politicians say than we do.....

    1. big_D Silver badge

      Re: Don't they keep a log of changes?

      Router logs and traffic monitoring would be more important than the change log - it might help localise where they should start looking, but it is the traffic logs that will provide the useful information.

      Also, with Office 365, more of the traffic is going externally, so there will be a bottleneck at the Internet connection, where all documents are trying to flow through the thinnest point of the network infrastructure.

  3. pacman7de
    Facepalm

    IT projects run on Government time ..

    "A botched network upgrade at the Houses of Parliament caused comms bottlenecks, web outages and continuing capacity woes – and could yet delay the full rollout of Office 365 for our lords and masters"

    It's policy to mess-up government IT projects, after all, if they did it right the once, they would have to do it right the next time. Government IT projects are designed to spend as much revenue as possible in the longest amount of time. The only thing that really matters is how far to spread the gravy ...

    --

    "in January, one of our suppliers involved in this upgrade inadvertently introduced an error in the supporting software. This had the opposite effect of that intended; that is, it reduced the capacity of the access to the internet"

    Just how difficult is it to configure a router?

    1. big_D Silver badge

      Re: IT projects run on Government time ..

      How difficult? Just ask yourself why Cisco router engineers need lots of training and certification... ;-)

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Just how difficult is it to configure a router?" Netgear routers have a very complex cli. ;)

  5. frank ly

    Huh?

    "... freezing or slowing down of your web browsing, video via the web ..."

    What is your reaction to our employees/servants browsing the web and watching videos in their place of work?

    1. GitMeMyShootinIrons

      Re: Huh?

      Or, in this context...

      What is your reaction to our corrupt elected/unelected bottom-feeders browsing for porn in their place of work?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Huh?

        If it prevents them from fiddling with the laws, I'd say buy 'em 4k monitors.

    2. localzuk Silver badge

      Re: Huh?

      Yeah, politicians would never want to watch internet video. There's no news videos, no politics videos, no corporate announcement videos on the internet... *rolleyes*

    3. big_D Silver badge

      Re: Huh?

      It depends, I spend a lot of time at work browsing the web, looking for relevant research information or for answers to support questions. If it is work related, where is the problem.

      The same for video calls, training videos etc.

      Browsing the web doesn't necessarily mean updating Facebook and watching cat videos on YouTube. ;-)

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    Office 365 you say ?

    Well that's all top secret UK parliament stuff ending up somewhere in Virginia then.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Office 365 you say ?

      MS offer Europe based hosting, so in theory the data is outside the NSA's grasp. :D

      1. localzuk Silver badge

        Re: Office 365 you say ?

        Outside the NSA's grasp? How cute.

        I believe the locations in the EU where Office 365 is hosted are Ireland and Netherlands.

        However, the NSA have reach simply because Microsoft is a US company.

  7. karlp

    Link Speed and Duplex....

    You'd be surprised the amount of "emergency" consulting work I do where the issue comes down to link speed and duplex. I can practically smell it these days.

    On another note, it is kind of amazing how even now, in 2014, the sheer magnitude of multi-thousand $/£ network infrastructure equipment out there which can't auto negotiate as well as a cheap realtek NIC.

    I was on a completely new build Fiber-MPLS network a few months back that had everything from Arista to Adtran, Cisco to Omitron in various places. They were having trouble all over the place, with the providers pointing to bad configs and the integrators pointing to provider problems and the local system admins wondering if this is just as good as it would be. At least half of the links had some sort of auto link speed issue or auto-MDIX issue. A day and a halve later - voila.

    Of course, to most people these days suggesting that we need to manually specify link speeds and use crossover cables comes across completely foreign.

    Karl P

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What i have heard on the grapevine is the ICT team said that there was not enough bandwidth to run all the 365 services. However it fell on deaf ears now the blame game begins. Poor Leadership from the House what a shock!

  9. XL360

    The interesting things about the Parliamentary ICT estate are that a) Its nothing to do with government - that requirement comes under the stewardship of the Cabinet Office and the various departments (ministries); b) in many respects, Parliamentary ICT could be considered to be a glorified ISP, seeing as although it has a large number of users, each MP and Lord is in fact their own little entity, with a maximum of 4 members of staff I believe.

    I'm not surprised by the misconfiguration bit, but more that Director of ICT isn't hanging someone out to dry....

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