Failed Win XP Upgrade Wipes Out UK Government Agency

Lurker McLurker writes "The BBC and the Register report that the UK Government's Department for Work and Pensions attempted to upgrade seven PCs from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, and ended up with BSODs on over 60,000 machines. I wonder if the National Health Service is regretting awarding Microsoft a £500 million contract now." The Guardian also has a good story.

The reason for the upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

They wanted that new version of Internet Explorer with the fancy built-in pop-up blocker.

oh hey what's going on with this upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

OH SHI-

I wouldn't want to be in their shoes now

[Lispy]

But still I have to say it: "HAHA!"

EDS now stands for...

[BlackHawk-666]

Every Desktop Shutdown.

UK agency made the correct choice!

[glomph]

Hey, they may have shite for brains, but the money was worth it! No trouble with the dreaded 228 patents that Linux supposedly infringes!

Nooo!

[Turn-X Alphonse]

It's like a thousand solitaire players suddenly cried out in frustration and then silence...

What the heck did they do?

[eltoyoboyo]

From the Guardian article: "At this point there is no known solution or ETA"

I RTFA and all I see is a money discussion, not a technical discussion. I would speculate that an SMS or Zenworks push or somthing similar which was supposed to be restriced to the 7 PC's went almost everywhere. It might be a fair bet that the remaining 20,000 might have been upgraded too if those people had been at work and turned on their computers. IT Computer management tools give the department much power, which could do plenty of damage in the wrong hands.

my email to EDS

[Leonig Mig]

It seems your firm is costing the British tax payer enormous quantities of cash, predominently through incompetence. Please take any drastic steps necessary to prevent any further IT disasters and consider if your firm deserves the billions of consulting dollars it has already banked.

Yours,

Jim.

oh yea

[Llevar]

Hopefully just another nail in Microsoft's coffin...

When a government ends up with BSODs on 60000 computers, it can't be good for Microsoft.

Yea, I can just see them going bankrupt over this. Their coffin was half closed before, but now they're bound to be pennystock.

Avoidable blunder

[Waffle Iron]

Obviously these sysadmins were incompetent. Everybody knows that a BSOD is impossible under Windows XP. If they had simply upgraded the other 60,000 machines to XP first, and then updated these 7 problem systems, this whole problem would easily have been avoided.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Here, in Canada, we don't have that kind of problems, as they spend the money on importing cocaine, censoring radio stations, funding lefty newspaper that help them spread the haterd of jews and americans, spreading cash around healthcare but not making the personel wash their hands (resulting in hundreds of deaths from infection), hiring lawyers to keep the mouths of people who had infected blood transfered to them shut and helping pedophiles reintegrate society instead of buying Microsoft stuff

Re:Another nail?

[Amiga Trombone]

When a government ends up with BSODs on 60000 computers, it can't be good for Microsoft.

No, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad for the rest of us!

Let's hope Congress plans to upgrade soon!

See? Even Microsoft is good for something!

Hope they all loose their jobs tomorrow

[t_allardyce]

Im pretty embarrassed for my country right now. How the fuck did we go from technological pioneers to this? And its only the tip of the iceberg, what with Ken Livingstone's numerous stupid ideas, David Blunkett's insanity and the incompetence of 100's of 'IT' projects (hint: if its called an IT project it means its run by incompetent MCSEs and it will fail catastrophically leaving millions of people without a service or having planes crashing into the ground, time and time again) with tax money falling out of their pockets, fuck them! Why do these idiots get the contracts? What happened to all the competent people??

The funniest thing..

[WindSword]

was the government spokesperson. After the intro to this piece on Radio 4 this morning, her opening sentence was "Let me correct you, 20% of our workstations are functioning". Talk about a positive spin.

Re:The reason for the upgrade

[phaln]

In other news, productivity is UP 64% since the day before the crash!

Upgrade to XP from 2000, LOL!

[bluntos]

..and they thought this would work?
They must be double stupid, with knobs on.
I can't believe it!! They Upgraded, rofl..

Re:The reason for the upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

That wouldn't have been hard. This is a government department. The only place for productivity to go would be up.

Re:We need to educate the decision makers

[mikerich]

There is a huge contract that'll be up for grabbs soon - EDS are preparing themselves to manage the UK national identity database and identity card scheme. This is one we could lobby our representatives on to ensure they do it right..

No, no, no, this is the one we lobby them to employ EDS and Microsoft on!

If MPs are stupid enough to implement Blunkettcards we should at least get some entertainment out of it.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:Another nail?

[Zangief]

Easy, a dialog like this appeared:

"Do you want to update the machines on your network now?"

[Accept]

No cancel button.
--
Wiki de Ciencia Ficcion y Fantasia, un cuento por Fly. [uchile.cl]

A little history...

[ixpro]

With a service history like this:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/04/26/child_supp ort_agency_it_failure/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/11/inland_rev enue_sacks_eds/ [theregister.co.uk]
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/04/eds_mulls_ abbey_offshore/ [theregister.co.uk]

How do these guys win new contracts from major companies? Amazing, truly amazing... I interviewed there once, got an offer, but that very night when I was thinking about taking the job, I had a pentagram stigmata burns appear on my back! It took 3 months of holy water baths to get it off...

Re:We need to educate the decision makers

[chary]

"Where to have the debate where it might be read by those who mater:"

And you lead with Boris?!

Member of Parliament

[dominux]

you can call them senators if it makes you feel better.

Re:We need to educate the decision makers

[chary]

"Hmmm? Oh, what? Oh, yes old bean, jolly bad show. Yes. Those bounders at the NHS need a...oh, just a moment, my phone's ringing, give me a minute. What? No, I'm giving a quote. Yes, thank you. Right, right, right. Yes. Microsoft. Very naughty blighters indeed. I shall immediately...I'm sorry, what was the question? Don't we do the caption round at this point? Gosh."

World Domination.

[Anonymous Coward]

"They emigrated, most likely. One of the problems with incompetence is that it's self-reinforcing, the competent get more and more fed up with having to deal with incompetence all day and find something better to do with their time."

We're all moving to the Hurd. Care to join us?

Re:The reason for the upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a government department. The only place for productivity to go would be up.

Dear Sirs:

I am a highly overpaid government employee with nothing better to do all day than read Slashdot and post AC comments, and frequent gambling and off-track betting sites. I and those of my many co-workers that were good enough to show up for work on a Friday and are not currently on a 3 hour lunch break and are looking at this on my monitor find the above post highly offensive and demand that you moderate it "flamebait " immediately. Otherwise, we shall be forced to file a grievance and call a national strike, affecting dozens.

Re:Too slow.

[Skuld-Chan]

Now imagine that had been, say, a Linux deployment... Who could EDS have called then?

This is actually a really good question. One thing I've found in Linux support is much of the software (the new software raid as an example) isn't clearly documented and when you do run into serious problems beyond a few simple things to try people generally seem clueless - even very experienced people. I blame a lot of this on constantly moving support targets (the day you document one issue, and its solution there have been 2-3 more kernels/patches with either a fix or a new issue). Plus there's no clear support message - who do I call - who can I blaim when everything blows up? Are the answers I get consistent (ie one support group will say/setup the system one way, and another a different way).

"the drives seem totally wiped - why that would happen after taking the raid offline and back online is beyond me" was quite literally the answer I got when I did have some serious problems with a 4 drive software raid setup.

Re:We need to educate the decision makers

[trewornan]

A lot of people see Borris as a potential party leader (including members of his party) and recently sacked or not, MPs are likely to listen to what he has to say.

Unit of time

[dackroyd]

= The ohno second - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

How Stuff Works

[PingPongBoy]

She added that the emergency payments system was "working perfectly."

Jones agreed, "I still have plenty of blank cheques. My pen is at room temperature."

How many MCSE's does it take to do a patch?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess one to do it and a hundred to undo the damage?

Re:We need to educate the decision makers

[mikerich]

And so another buzz word is born....

I do hope so! Blunkettcards can also be called 'Your inflexible friend' and should marketed with the slogan 'I know what's in your pocket.'

Best wishes,
Mike.

Re:The reason for the upgrade

[uhlume]

"LOL! Someone, please mod this up :-D"