Taxpayer wasted money: NMCI Windows 10 update

[nittany03]

NMCI is an enterprise solution for every Navy employee. By using a widely proliferated OS we ensure max compatibility with others and ability to use many COTS apps while avoiding a huge.training overhead because most are familiar with the windows OS. USN doesn't want or need to sustain an in house Unix system. With a few exceptions most employees need a box that can do the email and some internetting. There are other solutions available for people who need more horsepower.

The other cost would potentially be porting a bunch of specialized apps over to Linux. JMPS is one off the top of my head. No idea what stuff like that is written in or how cross-platform it is, but dev work costs big bucks.

@antonkr I see you're in undergrad CS at the moment. I don't know how much Windows/MS hate gets thrown around by the faculty, and yes, there are a lot of tech companies out there that have chosen to be Linux shops for various reasons. But Active Directory and Windows sysadmin type stuff is still absolutely a thing that can make one a career in the private sector for just the reasons @Pags described. I personally work in a shop where my devs will throw VS Code or IntelliJ (language dependent) onto a Windows desktop, pull down a local copy of a Git repo, and get to work. It's not unheard of even in tech. People know Windows. People know Office. Linux distros are definitely getting better, but every time I play with Linux, it seems there's always some amount of higher nerdery and Bash commands that seem to be required to un-futz things and get it working just right. It has its uses, but to create a regular old desktop, it's always seemed to be about 110 percent of the work to get 85 percent of the functionality of Windows. In tech, it's important to pick the right tool for the job . . .

 

[Brett327]

Not sure if it's AF specific, but once I installed the "DOD Install Root" software, things started to magically start working. Of course there's the issue with the new Microsoft Edge not working with S/MIME, but...yeah.

Edge is trash. Use Chrome.

 

[Brett327]

The other cost would potentially be porting a bunch of specialized apps over to Linux. JMPS is one off the top of my head. No idea what stuff like that is written in or how cross-platform it is, but dev work costs big bucks.

@antonkr I see you're in undergrad CS at the moment. I don't know how much Windows/MS hate gets thrown around by the faculty, and yes, there are a lot of tech companies out there that have chosen to be Linux shops for various reasons. But Active Directory and Windows sysadmin type stuff is still absolutely a thing that can make one a career in the private sector for just the reasons @Pags described. I personally work in a shop where my devs will throw VS Code or IntelliJ (language dependent) onto a Windows desktop, pull down a local copy of a Git repo, and get to work. It's not unheard of even in tech. People know Windows. People know Office. Linux distros are definitely getting better, but every time I play with Linux, it seems there's always some amount of higher nerdery and Bash commands that seem to be required to un-futz things and get it working just right. It has its uses, but to create a regular old desktop, it's always seemed to be about 110 percent of the work to get 85 percent of the functionality of Windows. In tech, it's important to pick the right tool for the job . . .

I poke at the linux OS in its virtual box on my PC from time to time, but it's mostly a novelty. Curious whether any large enterprise scale systems out there use a Linux-based OS.

 

[RedFive]

Edge is trash. Use Chrome.

Uggggghhh . . . RESERVIST SMASH!! ?

Sure, I can send stuff via SAFE, but whenever some chucklehead sends me encrypted PII via email, well, Internet Explorer it is, I guess. Oh, and apparently we can't get PKI certs to cross the streams or be at all standardized within DOD, so whenever my XO sends me something properly encrypted or signed from his GS account in SOCOM land, apparently I'm just supposed to go fuck myself.

Just wait til IE sunsets and S/MIME dies...

I think Chrome is great, I'm using it now. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't work with S/MIME and can't open encrypted or digitally signed emails on OWA. IE used to work for OWA, but it doesn't play nice at all with the fancy new OWA 360 that the AF is running. Edge was working fine until about a month ago when they updated it. The new Edge is literally Chrome wrapped in Edge clothing and it's literally impossible to downgrade....so S/MIME doesn't work. The AF has some sort of hard on for sending encrypted and/or digitally signed emails whereas I only ran into that in the Navy every once in a great while. It would be fine if MS had ensured S/MIME still worked with their update.....

 

[nittany03]

I poke at the linux OS in its virtual box on my PC from time to time, but it's mostly a novelty. Curious whether any large enterprise scale systems out there use a Linux-based OS.

Oh, there's plenty of use cases for them, but they all (but one) skew technical. Servers. Containers. Stuff like that. And sometimes folks who work a lot on Linux-based apps want to use that as their OS for convenience . . . or they're open source zealots who wish they could open-source free beer. But Linux is still what it's always been. By geeks, for geeks. That's not wrong, but for 99.9 percent of the companies out there or the government, you're just not going to put the Strike Group Admiral or CFO's laptop on Ubuntu and say "but OpenOffice." Not gonna happen.

Linux comes into its own in the datacenter behind the scenes, and other areas where it's more efficient to be able to run stuff at the command line. You buy stuff from Azure, it's probably ultimately a VM hosted on some kind of Windows Server. You buy stuff from AWS, it's probably a VM running a Linux box. Web servers are hugely Linux.

Oh, and the other one . . . Android is a port of Linux, so technically, a whole crapton of mobile phones are running the Linux kernel.

 

[Brett327]

I think Chrome is great, I'm using it now. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't work with S/MIME and can't open encrypted or digitally signed emails on OWA. IE used to work for OWA, but it doesn't play nice at all with the fancy new OWA 360 that the AF is running. Edge was working fine until about a month ago when they updated it. The new Edge is literally Chrome wrapped in Edge clothing and it's literally impossible to downgrade....so S/MIME doesn't work. The AF has some sort of hard on for sending encrypted and/or digitally signed emails whereas I only ran into that in the Navy every once in a great while. It would be fine if MS had ensured S/MIME still worked with their update.....

I just tell people to stop sending me encrypted emails when I'm on det. Seems to work. RHIP!

 

[scoolbubba]

Green shutdowning a common area computer is the ultimate in buddy fuckery. Change my mind.

 

[antonkr]

The other cost would potentially be porting a bunch of specialized apps over to Linux. JMPS is one off the top of my head. No idea what stuff like that is written in or how cross-platform it is, but dev work costs big bucks.

@antonkr I see you're in undergrad CS at the moment. I don't know how much Windows/MS hate gets thrown around by the faculty, and yes, there are a lot of tech companies out there that have chosen to be Linux shops for various reasons. But Active Directory and Windows sysadmin type stuff is still absolutely a thing that can make one a career in the private sector for just the reasons @Pags described. I personally work in a shop where my devs will throw VS Code or IntelliJ (language dependent) onto a Windows desktop, pull down a local copy of a Git repo, and get to work. It's not unheard of even in tech. People know Windows. People know Office. Linux distros are definitely getting better, but every time I play with Linux, it seems there's always some amount of higher nerdery and Bash commands that seem to be required to un-futz things and get it working just right. It has its uses, but to create a regular old desktop, it's always seemed to be about 110 percent of the work to get 85 percent of the functionality of Windows. In tech, it's important to pick the right tool for the job . . .

Truthfully I use a Windows machine for pretty much everything myself to the scoffing of some fellow classmates heh. I think I was mostly thinking more of specialized machines that would interact with hardware (ie ship navigation system) and secure machines and less administrative machines where familiarity is key and using off the shelf software makes most sense. My understanding of IT (let alone military IT) is pretty limited in retrospect. And yeah unfortunately anything Linux desktop related will always be difficult for any user.

 

[Brett327]

Most platform related stuff is proprietary and custom built for a specific purpose.

 

[nittany03]

Most platform related stuff is proprietary and custom built for a specific purpose.

And office work is office work anywhere.

 

[cfam]

I think Chrome is great, I'm using it now. Unfortunately, Chrome doesn't work with S/MIME and can't open encrypted or digitally signed emails on OWA. IE used to work for OWA, but it doesn't play nice at all with the fancy new OWA 360 that the AF is running. Edge was working fine until about a month ago when they updated it. The new Edge is literally Chrome wrapped in Edge clothing and it's literally impossible to downgrade....so S/MIME doesn't work. The AF has some sort of hard on for sending encrypted and/or digitally signed emails whereas I only ran into that in the Navy every once in a great while. It would be fine if MS had ensured S/MIME still worked with their update.....

I've been able to get S/MIME on OWA working on Firefox without any issues so far. I'm just using an out of the box laptop and an Identiv SCR3500A CAC reader.

 

[Ektar]

Green shutdowning a common area computer is the ultimate in buddy fuckery. Change my mind.

Yep...if you don't like someone, you use their machine and do a green shutdown. I can't think of anything you can do that would be worse in a public space...

 

[Pags]

Yep...if you don't like someone, you use their machine and do a green shutdown. I can't think of anything you can do that would be worse in a public space...

But you need to do green shutdowns to make the patches/updates/etc take appropriately. Not shutting down every so often screws up a machine something awful especially if patch 3 depends on the prior successful install of patch 1 and 2. That's why my machine has had to go back to Santa's workshop a couple of times.

 

[AllYourBass]

But you need to do green shutdowns to make the patches/updates/etc take appropriately. Not shutting down every so often screws up a machine something awful especially if patch 3 depends on the prior successful install of patch 1 and 2. That's why my machine has had to go back to Santa's workshop a couple of times.

Wish our IT shop would ensure computers are updated at 0300 and not when everybody is at work and pilots need to log SHARPS/NAVFLIRs

 

[Jim123]

Wish our IT shop would ensure computers are updated at 0300 and not when everybody is at work and pilots need to log SHARPS/NAVFLIRs

Half the time one of the reserve IT systems needs updating it seems to be during a (drumroll) weekend and during the (drumroll again) daytime. Late at night or even on a holiday weekend would work great but nooooo