US taxman slammed: Half of the IRS's servers still run doomed Windows Server 2003

Re: Priorities @Bigjohn

And EVERY position in the Obama administration was filled with Obama's appointees over the last 8 years. Notice how many military leaders he's burned through?

Therefore, EVERY problem that you hear of with the USA IT systems ultimately falls at the feet of the guy who looks like he should be the black Alfred E. Neumann of Mad Magazine. IE Dumbo the clown. How appropriate! What, me worry?

Obama's appointees hired or oversaw the very people that are supposed to maintain and secure this nations IT assets. That makes this ALL his fault right down to running insecure email servers for primadonnas, letting the Chinese and Russians run roughshod over all the OPM data. And anything else they took with them while they were rooting around like pigs in our servers.

Burn Lois Lerner and feed her to the employees of Goldman Sacks.

You don't want to hear my feelings about our so called President!

Re: Priorities@ Big John

How dare you criticize Obama on this site! /Sarc/

Re: Unusual project approach

While there is much truth in what you say, there are problems too. I've been on the receiving end of one of these "push it through now because it should have been done 5 years ago but the committees got in the way" projects. In an office with around a 1000 people we had hundreds who lost access to files as part of the migration. Mind you we weren't doing an upgrade, just a double hop network migration (current network had the same network as the parent network we needed to join so first it had to be renamed). Yes, we sorted it all out by the end of the week and no data was lost. But it would have been better had some appropriate planning been done.

As always the trick to getting these things to work properly is having a committee just large enough to cover all the details and have everybody on the committee committed to achieving the goal. Sadly that's one of the most difficult things on this planet to accomplish.

Re: Microsoft is Unrealistic

It isn't Microsoft that is being unrealistic, it is the organisations who think they can run servers indefinitely.

The bottom line is this - Microsoft is a business. To survive and thrive, they have to innovate, release new products and earn profits. Expecting them to support an OS forever is just silly.

It also ignores the realities of IT - things change. New systems improve on many of the old issues that organisations face. I mean, I'm chomping at the bit for the new Windows Server OS to be RTM'd and become stable. Some of the new features will save this organisation a chunk of cash, and save the IT team a chunk of time.

No, organisations should pay attention to what they are buying. No OS is going to last forever. Microsoft have been pretty clear with lifecycles of their OS's too, so there is pretty much no excuse.

If a business thinks a product that they bought 25 years ago is still serving them well, then they more than likely are going to be struggling to keep up with the modern world they are trying to sell to.

From the original manufacturer? A quick search would indicate that after a couple of takeovers, the company ended up going bust.

So, you're talking about copies and after market goods.

Cars aren't the same as complex software systems consisting of millions of lines of code...

Re: auditing method

"straight-forward" auditing methods when dealling with 10,000's of systems across multiple sites, only really help you identify the live machines connected to your network...

No at some point they are going to have to make a decision based on how confident they are that none of these 'missing' XP systems are still 'live' (and that includes the laptop in the bottom of the Security managers draw that was used to generate certificates) and thus write these systems off and so stop paying MS the annual licence subscription.

My guess is that at least a few of these systems are being used by employees/ex-employees in their homes. With the majority having been replaced (and hence scrapped) without inventory records being updated.

Re: The mind boggles

No, it's worse than that. While not at IRS I've seen some of the things the government does at my agency. I try to block it out because if I left my mind think about it for more than a minute or two it would quickly be reduced to ooze.

Mind you, on the tech side, I'm in a pretty decent shop at the moment. We actually complete our quarterly scans every quarter (95%+) and we get an actual touch on all the mostly disconnected systems. Last place I was at religiously did their quarterly scans once a year.

Re: One should note that it's precisely the same in most companies

" In the early 2000s they bought from Microsoft believing that they would continue to develop Windows in a reasonable way."

And here we have the real crux to the problem and the problems business now face with MS and the looming EoL for Win7 et al. There is little confidence that MS are and will continue developing Windows (or their other enterprise products) in a reasonable way. Company's such as IBM on the other hand, have demonstrated with their 1960's mainframe technology their capability for reasonable development.

Unfortunately, I do get the impression that the open-source movement hasn't (yet) fully understood and grasped the significance of this concept.

Re: One should note that it's precisely the same in most companies

No it's not. For one thing most companies aren't immune to federal regulations like the agencies that enforce them are.

Even in government most agencies have done a better job than the IRS. My own agency is mostly running Linux servers and the few Windows boxes are mostly 2013 with a few stragglers at 2008. The desktops have been Windows 7 SP1 since I got here three years ago, I think the upgrade was finished the year, possibly two, before I arrived.

Re: If it ain't broke, don't change it.

While I do generally subscribe to this maxim, in this case not having the same support as the primary OS does make it broken. While you may be paying for patching and support, since it isn't getting the same support as the OSes they are selling, you're still at a significant disadvantage. In my estimation, this only reinforces the need for an industrial grade OS where you can expect support for a 20-30 year period of time.