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Trying to reply to everything in one go here... On 12/05/17 18:42, Joseph Bennie wrote: > its about time they got a rocket - its total incompetence to be > running such a big org on NT/XP. they probably pay more in extended > MS/HP support that they would to nip out to PC world for their > licences. To be fair Win7 has been standard on *most* staff machines for a good while, but Server2003 (EOL) is harder to get rid of and lurks everywhere. Win10/Server2016 isn't even remotely on the cards yet. On 12/05/17 18:44, Martijn Grooten wrote: > PS the SMB vulnerability was patched by Microsoft a few months ago. If > you are responsible for Windows PCs anyway, DO PATCH. Change Control and patch testing my friend. I feel sorry for the IT folk because their hands are tied and trust me, it's killing them. You can't even wave a *critical* patch anyway near a NHS system without management descending on you in a perfect storm of incompetence and cover-your-assing. Us IT folks would scream at them until blue in the face but no: test everything in triplicate (itself not a bad idea, if done expeditiously of course), sign it off, request change control management, stage it to the (overloaded) WSUS boxes, activate roll out in stages via departmental VLAN segregation and pray nothing goes wrong. Which it always would. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with you and the IT staff know this as well: the problems are systemic and endemic. There's a reason - several actually - why I left the NHS. On 12/05/17 18:49, daniel Phillips wrote: > Forgive me for not knowing the current IT circumstances within > government and the NHS. But wouldn't switching to an OSS alternative in > fact save them millions and still be a little more secure then the > systems they have in place at present? I have read other countries are leading the way and switching to OSS and standards. Do you think our government should have got on this band wagon a long time ago? No, forgive me! Of course you wouldn't know that, and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. In brief, probably yes: switching vast swathes of government IT to open source systems almost definitely would have major advantages but the problems aren't so much technical as political and financial. As usual. There is a long and very depressing history of the upper echelons of NHS management making transparently idiotic purchasing decisions and painting themselves into corners with such bastions of commercial responsibility as HPE, Oracle, Microsoft, RM NHS for literally decades. Read up on the history of NHS "preferred suppliers" and weep at the mind-blowing waste and futility. That's your taxpayer money being pissed away right there. On 12/05/17 18:57, Joseph Bennie wrote: > The $ cost per os licence is trivial compared with the over head of > installs, patching and app compatibility. > > and thats why enterprises choose MS ... the release cycle is 5-10 > years, which means the test and redow cycle is 5-10 years. With opens > source is't 6-12 months. > > Can you imagine the cost of having to do full environment testing for > custom apps every 6 months? > > ... I don't think the NHS even knows what continuous integration is. > I'd put money on some critical apps are still COBOL. A thousand times this. Even the horrific up-front cost of something like an Oracle RAC cluster or an EMC SAN is nothing compared to the staff costs and maintenance over the lifetime of the contract. *Nothing*. Although to be fair Joseph we don't build mission critical enterprise infrastructure on Mint or whatever crappy distro of the month - RedHat, SuSE, IBM and many others are waiting in the wings with very long term support systems with stable ABIs etc and would love to have a big slice of that lovely lovely NHS revenue. Nobody I know would take you up on your COBOL bet either, because it's pretty obviously easy money (for you!). I've personally seen mission critical RDB instances still running Very Important Stuff Indeed and I mean from before Oracle bought it back in 1994 :| Think databases that have transitioned on VMS through VAX and Alpha and to this day are still slowly porting over to Itanium. And that's just the tip of the iceberg! Fortran, Solaris (on Sparc, of course) and Tru64 still lurk deep in the bowels of the NHS alongside OS400 and XP or Win2000 workstations running the control software interface for Â5m MRI scanners (because the manufacturers never updated the systems and who replaces a Â5m MRI unit when they don't have to?). The only mercy here is that stuff like that was long since deemed to be *way* too important to trust to lowly NHS staff so has all been moved off-premises to DCs run by specialist companies who predictably make a mint keeping this stuff running. Oh man, the horror stories I could tell you about the NHS... Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq