Behind the Curtain at TCG

NasBackup and the amazing Butch

TCG has a bunch of staff spread across the country. This presents a number of technical challenges for data security and corporate data integrity. We've put in place measures such as our VPN, which has created an internal "LAN" that's proving very useful. But client backups have always been painful. For a while we were using Connected Online Backup, which was good but increasingly expensive as our backup needs grew, and Remote Backup, which was never as reliable as we need.  Our incredible CTO, Robert "Butch" Buccigrossi, has recently taken a really interesting tack, using an open source backup app called NasBackup.

NasBackup uses the rsync command to execute backups to a remote server. As Butch said, "rsync itself is as reliable as a rock. The problem is that it is as user friendly as a rock. The magic of NasBackup is that it places a simple but effective graphical user interface to a very cryptic command-line utility." That sounds simple enough but there's actually a great deal of techno-wizardry happening to make it easy for the end user and as reliable as one would expect. As with most nascent open source applications, NasBackup is being developed by a core set of people, with others adding changes organically as they modify the source code to meet their own needs. And this is exactly what Butch recently contributed to the project.

He took the source code, added some significant modifications, reorganized the source tree to make future modifications easier, and then contributed his work back into the project. You can see all the details in his posting here. As a result of his work, we now have a very reliable backup system that we're able to use from anywhere we happen to be, and the application is much easier for others to deploy, use, and expand upon.

Butch actually has a history of this kind of innovation. (A doctorate from UPenn is testament to that, too!) Another great example is SteelBlue, an application server that Butch and Al Crowley designed and built way back in the mid-90's, before security was really a built-in feature of most web apps.

My only serious complaint about Butch is that he appropriated the nickname that is rightfully mine before I joined the company. Damn him for being such an outstanding individual! If you'd like to know more about our work with NasBackup, send me a note.

Implementing GAO's grants recommendations

A few of us in the National Grants Partnership (NGP) are putting together a white paper titled "Accelerating Grants Streamlining: Furthering the Recommendations of the GAO Grants Streamlining Report". GAO's April report regarding grants streamlining made several recommendations [links to my other blog] but didn't provide any hint about how agencies could actually use them. We hope to start the ball rolling in making GAO's recommendations implementable.

Folks from all levels of government are helping us in this effort by reviewing our work as it develops. In working on the white paper,  it's become pretty clear to me that the government has missed a lot of important considerations and inputs from non-government people in their discussions of grants streamlining...or, at least, it appears that way. We're in the final draft stage now, so the paper will be published pretty soon. I'll put a link up on the blog once it's public. In the meantime, if you'd like to know more, e-mail me.

GSA: "Tell us if you're open"

According to FCW, GSA wants vendors on their Schedule 70 contract to "identify  the open standards their products support." This is a fantastic idea. If you've ever reviewed a vendor's GSA Schedule contract, you'll know that picking apart the specifications of what's being offered is pretty difficult. The need for open standards compliance is high-level enough to warrant mentioning in the contract, unlike many specifications that the government may like to search contracts for, and it's encouraging that government wants to identify products with this quality. However, I have three questions:

1. I haven't seen anything from GSA on this. All I've seen or heard is this FCW article. Under what directive or instruction is GSA urging vendors to put effort into this?
2. GSA contracts are complicated beasts. Are there any instructions on how vendors should include this data in their contracts?
3. Will GSA contracting officers and their COTRs actually use this information? Or is this just something that someone at GSA thinks might be useful and believes the vendor community should provide because we're nice people?

FCW's article has an interesting quote from Chip Mather, senior vice president at Acquisition Solutions:

"For most software platforms, [vendors] want to be interoperable with the products they want to be interoperable with, [and not with] their competitors," he said. "They're not against us, they're just for themselves."

While I agree with Mr. Mather that many vendors will feel conflicted by GSA's request for this information, concerns about interoperability are likely to lead to blind alleys for software vendors. Interoperability is at the heart of the modern architectures. Protect what is uniquely valuable that only your product can provide but don't be so obnoxious as to believe that your product can fulfill all needs.

New Blog, New Corporate Blogging Policy

At company meetings and email discussions, we realized that we had many opinions and ideas that we simply kept to ourselves.  Therefore, TCG has decided to open a corporate blog so that we could share our thoughts on our areas of business:

• Science research related IT
• Grants Management
• Government IT

As CTO of a small business, it fell upon me to answer the following questions:

• Should we host the site or have it hosted, and where?
• How should the site be organized?
• What will our blogging policies be?

As with almost any new question, I turned to my colleagues and the Web for possible solutions.  Since bloggers are by nature prolific writers, I shouldn't have been surprised by the volume of opinions and data available.  But it truly is vast.

While TCG hosts our own Web, mail, CVS, backup, and other servers, it turns out that using a blogging host for many months is cheaper than setting up our own blogging server (even considering open source servers).  In addition, people seem to like Typepad and the Movable Type platform upon which it is based.  So to mitigate the risk and cost, we went with Typepad.   A great comparison of blogging server software is on Asymptomatic.

With our blogging solution chosen and a discussion of how the site was to be run (in order to keep a high publishing rate, we decided to start with everyone in our small company posting to a single blog), it was time to examine our blogging policy.  Of course, we had none.  As it turns out, an excellent review of eight different company policies is on CorporateBlogging.info.  By combining Fredrik's "Core" and "Common" rules we arrive at a draft skeleton of the TCG Blogging Policy:

• You're personally responsible
• Abide by existing rules
• Keep secrets
• Be nice
• Add value
• Follow the law
• Respect copyright
• Cite and link
• Discuss with your manager 

And thus, a new corporate blog is born...