SysAdmin on a battle ship

Posted on:September 07 2010

Incredible comment of an sysadmin active-duty sailor of the US Navy Marine Corps found on wired (via fefe):

Ships run the Common PC Operating System Environment (COMPOSE). It's essentially a Windows server with a huge and insanely convoluted proprietary set of applications that are all somehow dependent on one another. Not a day goes by where there isn't something that isn't working correctly on the network, and when you dedicate time and effort to troubleshoot the problem and then report your findings back to the SME's at SPAWAR or Juno, you're told to reinstall the entire server! It's like someone at Juno decided that since they can't control the network on the ship, they'll just make it such a complicated piece of crap that we'll have no choice but to turn to them and ask why we can?t do something as simple as change a password using their proprietary tools.

IT people on these ships only seem to have user level accounts and have to call helpdesk themselves which is a government service and only available during working hours. Increbible. That's how these huge battle ships are run? If some nation thinks about invading the U.S., it should maybe consider hiring some virus programmers instead of soldiers :)

Comments:

With that advice given, you better don't plan to travel to the US anytime soon... ;-)

matt

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2010-09-07 19:50:00

Lol ... I thought they had a better system on their ships. One that can be administered without such problems. And I never thought they use Windows servers ;)

Brainsaw

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2010-09-08 07:32:00

n00bs haha.

taylor

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2010-09-08 08:03:00

not just on ships, I've known enough different people that have worked for the Department of Defense to have heard enough complaints about their network being horribly kludgy

sRc

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2010-09-08 14:07:00

Trust me, being a Sysadmin in the AF for years, it's much better now then it was, but due to all the security layers, it's still a pain. Plus admins aren't really admins anymore - used to have domain level rights, now I'm lucky if I can install software patches and printer drivers.

Myopic1

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2010-09-12 20:56:00

Anyone remember the USS (United States Ship) Yorktown being "dead in the water" under Windows NT?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Yorktown_%28CG-48%29#Smart_ship_testbed

Read the 2nd paragraph, the one that starts with "On September 21"

Dan

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2010-09-18 02:05:00