NMCI and Other Nefarious Adventures

Why does it take so long for an NMCI machine to boot up? Exactly what is the machine doing when it boots? Does anyone know?

We took a small sampling of boot up times for both laptop and desktop seats. Remember this is relatively current hardware running Windows 2000 -- not state of the art but certainly not something out of the 80s. These are average times.

Laptop -- From Boot to Login: 3 Minutes, 37 Seconds
Laptop -- From Login to Desktop: 2 Minutes, 18 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 5 Minutes 55 Seconds

Desktop -- From Boot to Login: 3 Minutes, 30 Seconds
Desktop -- From Login to Desktop: 2 Minutes, 12 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 5 Minutes, 42 Seconds

Of course NMCI attempts to mitigate these times by instructing users to not turn off their machines at night. Of course this flies in the face of the energy saving initiatives at many sites. More importantly, many laptop users have discovered -- the hard way -- that their laptop hard drives are not rated for continuous duty. Leaving these machines on 24 hours a day is the kiss of death for the older Dell hard drives.

It should be noted that some machines took significantly longer to boot, so much so that they were not even recorded in this sample and dismissed as aberrant. One desktop machine took over 10 minutes after log in to present a usable desktop. Several laptops on the same network at the same facility took an extra minute beyond the times shown here.

As a data point, the following times were taken from several legacy Windows XP machines running similar hardware.

From Boot to Login: 41 Seconds
From Login to Desktop: 17 Seconds
Total Unusable Time: 58 Seconds

Certainly all of these times, NMCI and Legacy, are the result of dozens of variables. It appears that the NMCI machines are interacting heavily with Domain Controllers or something else on the network during boot.

Just as long as people are counting the extra five minutes of wasted employee time (several times a day for thousands of employees) when they tout the improved efficiency of NMCI.

For what its worth, NMCI has released the results of the most recent "customer satisfaction" survey conducted first quarter 2005. The survey was conducted from February 28th to March 29th and was sent to 25% of the deployed users. We shall see if details of the survey are forthcoming. Previous surveys have been shrouded in mystery with EDS refusing to release details including what questions were actually asked.

EDS reports that the latest results show that overall customer satisfaction was at 73.6% which is up from the previous survey results at just over 72%. Further breaking down the results, EDS says users are happy with EDS personnel (86%) and not so happy with "the processes to make changes to the IT environment" (56% satisfied).

We could find no further details about which "processes" they are talking about. One is also left to wonder (much as last time survey results were released) exactly what questions were asked and how many surveys were actually returned to be counted. The usual gouge at Federal Computer Week, Government Executive and Navy/Federal Times sheds no light on the subject either.

Apparently Marine Corps customers were left out of previous surveys. Joining in this survey, only 69.1% of Marines were satisfied with NMCI. Not a glowing recommendation. Then again, we don't even have a clue as to what "satisfied" actually means in this context.

Let's give credit where credit is due. NMCI does do some things right. Albeit a bit late.

In an effort to allow laptop users to utilize higher bandwidth legacy and "secular" networks, NMCI began officially rolling out its Broadband Unclassified Remote Access Service (BuRAS) in late March. BuRAS is not much more than a virtual private network (VPN) solution that is custom tweaked to operate correctly with the NMCI software and OS load.

EDS reports that it is officially pushing BuRAS to "Navy flag officers, SES personnel, and their direct staffs" and expects to push to all 80,000 NMCI laptop users in a phased approach. It has not been rolled out to Marine Corps seats yet. It remains a mystery why initial pushes to high-ranking personnel were deemed more important than any other user. With rank comes privilege, apparently....

BuRAS has been in beta test for several months with select users. It works well although, like some other software VPN solutions, takes a fair amount of time to establish a connection before the user can begin working. Once connected it offers the mobile user full access to all NMCI assets such as shared drives, E-mail and intranet servers.

Users can connect via any high speed connection such as ADSL, cable modems, corporate Ethernet networks, and hotel or airport networks. It uses the RJ-45 Ethernet port on the laptop. USB connectivity via external adapters is not supported.

The Navy Marine Corps Intranet appears to be simply the Navy Intranet or the Marine Corps Intranet depending on what side of the Pentagon you salute. Navy users can plow through literally thousands of E-mail addresses in the MS Outlook global address book without seeing a single Marine Corps E-mail address. Marine Corps users have no access to the Navy address list either.

NMCI has stated that it has "no plans" to merge the two databases. We believe that is perhaps a bit overstated (and certainly came from an unofficial and non-authoritative source). Perhaps they mean they have no immediate plans to provide a single address list. Perhaps they can not do it because of technical limitations in their chosen database method.

Whatever the reason, the purple color of NMCI appears to be fading a bit more every day.

Apparently some people haven't seen/heard these so I post them here for all to enjoy. They are a bit dated.



NMCI Disco Version (Somewhat of a stretch)

NMCI Minister of Information

Laptop Fire (1600x1200 Makes a good screen saver)