Shutdown Illustrates How Fast US Gov't Can Update Its Websites 77
An anonymous reader writes "Despite what we hear about how much the U.S. government is struggling with a website, it is reassuring that most of government entities can update their websites within a day after they are asked to. This conclusion is the result of research done by the Networking Systems Laboratory at the Computer Science Department of the University of Houston. The research team tracked government websites and their update times, and found that 96% of the websites were updated within 24 hours after President Obama signed HR 2775 into law, ending the Government shutdown. Worth noting that two websites took 8 days to update. It is interesting that the team was able to use the shutdown as an opportunity to study the efficiency of the IT departments of various parts of Government."
Re:It's not that hard. (Score:4, Informative)
Except most did it via DNS redirects. Many actually turned off the servers, so they weren't serving a "Gone Fishin'" page. They changed DNS to point over to usa.gov, which remained open and hosted the static pages.
Re:Depends on what you mean by "Update" (Score:5, Informative)
Should we expect it to take much time to post a new notice or change some text on the front page of a website?
Exactly. I am one of the government workers who 'shut down' our website.
/* for you manager types, I cannot serve up a web page if I have shut my web server down */
All I did was replace the index page and altered the security program to prevent working even if you still had a valid cookie.
It took me 30 seconds to log in (from home) and undo the fixes (and most of that time was spent logging in).
Shutdown means different things to different people. For the last shutdown, we were given two conflicting orders:
1. Turn off the web servers
2. Display a web page to visitors announcing we are shut down.
That isn't a problem of government; it is a problem of non-techie managers freaking out and trying to one-up each other.
I have seen similar things happen in private industry.