Criminal cases, public and police safety put at risk by IT failures, RCMP documents say

Old trick, and a desperate one. If that is your backup strategy, you are supremely screwed. Dry.

Three things:

1. Server 2003 was end-of-life by Microsoft back in June/July 2015.

2. No end of hackers are looking at this and planning on attacking the RCMP servers . Server 2003 is a breeze to hack with 64-bit tools. It's not even challenging.

3. The RCMP is being treated with the same contempt, disdain, and lip service as your military. You people...conservative, liberal...all of you...seriously need to consider your priorities. When you have no end of funding for bullshit like global warming and gender equality horseshit but you're failing on the basic services of a nation state like military and police you're doing it wrong.

Premier customers can pay for Server 2003 support, on a case by case basis and Microsoft will support it. But licensing it horrendous, something like $1,000 per month per server.

We had to pay for support for a couple months because the new Accounting system wasn't ready yet, and the old one ran on 2003. The vendor stopped returning our calls when they found out we were leaving them, so we couldn't transition to 2008 in the meantime.

And I agree with you on #3. Mostly. We do need to fund them, and we need to stop this foolishness of 'Shared Services' fits all. But just because there are other funding priorities doesn't mean they aren't important as well.

Last night in Alberta they were down to pen and paper. Call takers hand writing complaints and then passing them around to a dispatcher. They couldn't do background checks, hell they couldn't even check license plates.

Another problem is communications, take Red Deer for an example there are area's in the city their portable radios fail, a lot of times they go into a building and OCC calls to see if their alright, the cops most times have to come out and use the car radio to communicate.

When we were hired to help snowplow for the city we received portable radios and we had no problems, no matter where we were, even in 7 / 11's having coffee, not all RCMP radios can do that.

Looks like that was a CPIC outage, country wide. More Shared Services bullshit.



http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-co ... -1.3942846

Damn. You do that kind of shit in California and Jerry Brown will personally sign your termination papers...and that's not a joke. More than a few people have been escorted off their jobs at Jerry's orders.

One thing about California is after about 20 years of IT projects being multi-billion dollar clusterfucks we're now getting it dialed in so good that even the Feds are envious of us (when we do it right).

Trust me when I say this: the main priority for Canadians, especially Canadian politicians, is to be able to feel good from projecting the of being good. There's millions of Canadians still creaming themselves when they remember someone like Bono saying "the world needs more Canada". We get a compliment and a pat on the head from one of the Famous & Important types like that and the tail doesn't stop wagging for at least a decade. Seriously, that's the main priority up here and it's been like this for a couple of generations now - the need to be loved and the manic desperation to always be seen as the good guy.

I know you folks in the US are in one hell of a mess and have been for a very long time too. Canada though? We're as much of a mental/emotional clusterfuck of a country as any other one out there. There is NOTHING up here that anyone anywhere should be wanting to emulate.

Keep the focus on IT problems. Fix one problem at a time, never mind the general political environment.
Politicians merely appoint the person at the top and hire or fire the actual workers.

The IT problem stems that the management mandarins, private and public don't really know shit about computer systems. The workers love systems that guarantee job security (endless glitches, hacks, upgrades) at the same time those above them do everything possible to farm their jobs out.

Never been a fan of Windows networks, if you're gonna use them you have to prepare and budget for end of life and upgrades, etc BEFOREHAND. Not 3 OS upgrades later. It's a commercial product so you expect planned obsolesence.
The same organizations replace their cars every three years, why does the even the local copshop still have things running XP?

Bit of trivia: The station controllers in the Intel fabrication plants ('fabs') for the Xeon processors are stand-alone Windows 95 machines. They're not networked, they're in cold clean rooms so they never wear out or get thermodynamic stress so there's no reason to replace them...even after twenty-four years.

Bit of trivia: The station controllers in the Intel fabrication plants ('fabs') for the Xeon processors are stand-alone Windows 95 machines. They're not networked, they're in cold clean rooms so they never wear out or get thermodynamic stress so there's no reason to replace them...even after twenty-four years.

That's the difference between doing something and the appearance of doing something.

What unicorn rainbow world do you live in?

If Public and Private don't know shit about he massive networks we build, then who does? Some fat guy in his mother's basement?

I take pride in the uptime and performance of my networks, that's why we buy million dollar bits of equipment every year - to ensure the customer is always serviced and never sees unscheduled downtime. That reliability lets me focus on the day to day maintenance, and future planning for the systems instead of panic ridden stressful starts to my day. Or in the middle of the night.

Recently, my team moved our Disaster Recovery site from one location to Service Alberta datacenters, because the same stupid directive that Harper gave to create Service Canada was also given by Madame Redford that all Alberta Ministries shall give up operation of their IT infrastructure to Service Alberta. We moved 4 racks of equipment on a Saturday, had it all running by Sunday - and no one noticed. I'm proud of that.

SA doesn't guarantee uptime, or performance. They will only give cost projections to the Ministries for a two year period. In other words, the quality service at the cost we deliver it will not be the same when services are blended.

Just like the RCMP, StatsCan, the Supreme Court . . . .

Cost cutting where it benefits the customer makes sense. Cost cutting for the sake of partisan beliefs is harmful to Canadians.

Always seemed to be that way to me, if you look at some of the IT failures with healthcare records in Ontario and BC. Is it really that complicated implementing these systems? Maybe just keep the fat guy around in a closet with all the Doritos and pop he can eat.

Always seemed to be that way to me, if you look at some of the IT failures with healthcare records in Ontario and BC. Is it really that complicated implementing these systems? Maybe just keep the fat guy around in a closet with all the Doritos and pop he can eat.

Yes, it really is that difficult. I know, because the company I work for did both of those projects.

The problem starts with trying to integrate systems that were never meant to play nicely with any other systems. Then you add a sprinkle of impossible tasks added by Managers and Directors who have no IT experience and assume that muffler bearings will magically interface with a self sealing stem bolt, and the headaches begin. Follow that up with an impossible requirement that not only Hospitals should interface with it, but so should the randomly built-by-some-highschool-kids IT infrastructure of every General Practitioner's office province wide - and you have the recipe for failure.

The fat guy in the basement doesn't have enough life experience to even comprehend the problem, let alone gather the requirements for a logical look at it.

I would suggest to your sales force that they learn to say no to Manangers and Directors and not promise the moon to get the contract at any price. And that govts that let the contracts put in language that holds the contractor reponsible for fulfilling the contract.