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 …
>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.
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.
"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...
"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.....
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.
"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 ...
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"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?
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. ;-)
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
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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