Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248
PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."
fully operational doesn't mean what it sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainframes of yore had a hell of a lot of moving parts: a large system might have dozens of tape drives and disk drives. Tape drives in particular broke down all the time and were taken offline until the maintenance guy came for his weekly or monthly visit and tightened the belts or whatever the hell they did. Knuth remarked on that situation in his magnum opus TAOCP vol 3 on sorting and searching. In the part about sorting with tape drives, he remarked that he'd never seen a large computer installation where all the tape drives were working. You'd have a computer with ten tape drives, two of them would be down pending repairs, and you'd use the other eight. In other words your computer was operational but not FULLY operational.
There is a similar situation in today's data centers. Even at the wimpy little shop I worked in last year (about 2000 computers) some were always down. We were doing pretty good if the number down at any moment was less than a few dozen. I don't think we ever had a single day of being fully operational (every single computer up at the same time). That was fine, it wasn't a requirement, it was a distributed system and the data and functions were all sufficiently replicated that we kept running, by design, even with parts of the system unavailable.
Re:Here's An Idea ... (Score:3, Interesting)
You can get a 486 (DX2 66 MHz?) with 40 MB ram and eventually four harddrives, 3com 509b NIC and I think two disk drives if you come pick it up here.
I live in Sweden.
Re:Two Satans (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you convert that into a more familiar unit, like Library of Congresses?
You know the Library of Congresses is a pretty reliable machine. Does anybody know what its downtime is?
Re:1980's mainframe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't ever underestimate the difficulty of porting specialized applications
One Government agency I know of was informed with 5 years advance notice that their long time mainframe computer manufacturer would no longer be in the hardware business nor support the operating system. The Govt let a huge contract to port the applications. After several years, and millions spent in progress payments, that conversion attempt failed. So did several more. So after 10 years and about 4 attempts at conversions using some of the biggest software contract houses in the country they were still running on the original hardware and software and buying used equipment for backup. One of the few in the world.
It got done eventually I suppose.
Why, you ask, was it such a task to convert? Because they were attempting to replace something that had been custom built on top of and inside an operating system over perhaps 20 years. Distributed database and multiple geographic locations processing bits of the data using computers from multiple manufacturers communicating together long before the Internet (not that you could have put that kind of data on the net). So in order to convert, it took an understanding of how the whole thing worked and those that had that level of understanding had long since retired. It wasn't Cobol that was the problem but human limitations.
Re:1980's mainframe? (Score:5, Interesting)
The traffic signal system called SCATS was like that. It was hand assembled in PDP 11 machine code. There was business logic built into device drivers to get around executable image size issues. The people who wrote (more like built) it knew it inside out. They were just lucky to get it ported before those guys retired.
Re:1980's mainframe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ah. So you will just port all their data from their old proprietary database system to a new proprietary database. Piece of cake.
You would need a security clearance for starters. Then the software would have to be developed to US Federal/Military standards. Maybe that requires CMMI-5 these days. So there's certification of the development processes, auditing and QA.
I think we are talking 100E6 USD before any code is actually written.
Re:Here's An Idea ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Should have RTFA. If we're talking an IBM mainframe, then you're certainly right. I cut my programming teeth on those 40 years ago (and haven't been near one in 35), and the basic architecure is still around, though many details have changed. In fact, I've long been convinced that this kind of need for backward compatibility is the only reason people still buy mainframes. Though there are those who are convinced they're fundamentally kewler.
The problem is probably as much political as bureaucratic, if not more so. An upgrade of this magnitude is when you hear "soo-ee! soo-ee!" echoing through the halls of Congress.
Law enforcement systems are hard (Score:4, Interesting)
The article is bogus, but the problem is real. Computer support systems for investigators are hard to build. The FBI has struggled with this, taking about a decade to deploy their "Field Office Automation" system. They're hard for many of the same reasons medical systems are hard - much of the incoming data is unstructured, and many people enter data relevant to the same case. It's even harder than in the medical world, because links between various individuals and events are important, but unreliable. The "customers" aren't cooperative, they usually don't have unique identifiers, and a sizable fraction of the information is bogus. The security problems are tough to even define - exactly who's allowed to see what is a big issue.
The older law enforcement systems didn't offer much searchability. Unless you had a hard search key, like a driver's license number or a full name, you couldn't retrieve much. Now, everybody expects Google-like searchability, and the older systems just didn't have the machinery for that.
Re:$187 million? (Score:3, Interesting)
These jackoffs would have us believe it's going to cost $180 million to replace some bullshit law enforcement database software that's 20 years old?
The rated you funny, but it's true. FBI CASE system also vintage 1980's mainframe system. They have tried and failed twice to rewrite 20 year old law enforcement database software at over half a billion spent so far. First time they said they didn't even have anything salvageable to show for it and threw out the entire project which aos happened to be around that magic number of $180 million. (These are mind boggling numbers. The beltway bandits and their bureaucrat sponsors are capable of sinking unfathomable amounts of money into failed software projects.)
As has been noted in previous posts, newer IBM hardware runs the older software, so it shouldn't be ancient hardware falling apart as is implied here. I haven't read TFA to see if there's any detail behind what exactly is failing 1/3 of the time because generally there's no detail and what there is I mostly don't believe.
People blame the government bureaucrats, but the failed work is done by the huge consulting companies. They can blame the specs but the failures are for nearly every major software system for the last 20 years, several multiple time failures, and several still not replaced or working.
This sounds to me like the bureaucrats are raising the level of lying in a competition for what's the most desperate government software system needing replaced.
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