Extreme IT: Veterans sound off on military information technology challenges

They fail to mention the out dated gear that has no replacement parts as they are no longer made. Myself and two other First Class IT's had to take 3 broken routers and try to assemble a working one,(full network outage issue) then build a boot strap file from scratch while underway in the Med with only a Sat phone and few friends state side who would google crap for us or break out their books. We worked on that for 3 days straight napping when we had to, we got it up and running and the system working. A Month later had another system crap its self whole network down and that one was hardwired in. I rigged a bypass with cross over cables and a few other tricks. People that "own" those systems wanted to know how I did that as it was not suppose to be possible to bypass their garbage.

Its interesting the programs, systems and gear that get bought and forced upon us by people who have the tech savvy of a brick. We once got 30 new printers, real fancy models and for a slightly less price than the normal ones. Thing is no one looked up the cost of the print cartridges ($400 a pop Fusers were $600)Oh and they liked to blow up the ink cartridge inside the printer making everything look like crap... and they only printed about 500 sheets per cartridge.

Yep fun times in IT land!

Good article, thanks for posting. 'Extreme environments' had me remembering supporting the Marines in Mogadishu and the Army at the Port of Damman as a contractor working on their prepositioned programs information systems. In Damman working out of a container in 100+ heat we had a hell'va time keeping the computers cooled...

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