CAPP 227 questions (IT Officer)

[Tom Eggers]

Reply #21 asks how he can do this for his IT tech rating:
4. Develop one automated information tool for use by unit
leadership for analysis of measurable performance data.

One very good way is to download CAPWATCH data for your unit, then use SQL to write a report that doesn't already exist in eServices, then track the numbers over time by recording the numbers in a graph. Any project needs goals, goals need metrics to measure progress, and progress shows most clearly on a graph.

twe

[Tom Eggers]

I'm in the process of updating the IT specialty track study guide, CAPP227. As a couple of the replies in this topic have noted, some of the activity items for the ratings are hard, if not impossible, to accomplish. Therefore I want to update the list of activities for each of the three ratings. Please post here, or send me an email, your suggestions of what should be kept, what should be removed, and, most importantly, what items might be added to the activity lists to make them more realistic and to give more than seven options.

An example, OPSEC can be deleted: it's now required for Level 1. Another: formal IT or CS education, such as an associates or a bachelor's degree, can be added to the list, thus giving another optional way to get to the five required activities.

Gentlemen, start your engines and give me more ideas.

Tom Eggers, Lt Col
Director, COWG/IT
Member, National IT Committee

[Tom Eggers]

Reply #2 asks these questions:
(1) Where can I find templates for a squadron IT plan?
(2) How about finding group, wing, and national plans?
(3) Is CyberPatriots coaching/mentoring ever going to be incorporated into this track?

Answers to be in the revised CAPP 227 I'm working on for the National IT Committee:
(1) This task will be replaced with something realistic. I've never seen such a template either.
(2) Ditto, any echelon plans.
(3) Yes. One of the tasks for each of the three ratings will be "Act as Coach, Team Assistant, or Mentor for one season of a Cyber Patriot team."

I need more tasks to replace the current unrealistic ones. Please post your suggestions here. I'm watching, and I have Notify set.

twe

[Holding Pattern]

I'll review my notes (and my old posts) and post some thoughts on this over the next week.

[Holding Pattern]

Reply #2 asks these questions:
(1) Where can I find templates for a squadron IT plan?
(2) How about finding group, wing, and national plans?
(3) Is CyberPatriots coaching/mentoring ever going to be incorporated into this track?

Answers to be in the revised CAPP 227 I'm working on for the National IT Committee:
(1) This task will be replaced with something realistic. I've never seen such a template either.
(2) Ditto, any echelon plans.
(3) Yes. One of the tasks for each of the three ratings will be "Act as Coach, Team Assistant, or Mentor for one season of a Cyber Patriot team."

I need more tasks to replace the current unrealistic ones. Please post your suggestions here. I'm watching, and I have Notify set.

twe

Ok, I've done a bit of a review and here are my first thoughts.

1. I actually think we do need an IT plan. I've been using Trello to build our squadron IT plan, and it works well, but it has the problem of not being used by anyone but the IT people. Which is a very small group. This leads me to...
2. We need to seriously reach out to IT people to get them to join. The good news is that we have several carrots for this that aren't being utilized:
     a. CyberPatriot Dreamspark membership. This literally hands $20k worth of software to each coach and competitor. With the dissolution of Technet subscriptions, trust me, people in IT want this.
     b. AEX tools. Things like AGI's STK, and the training to use it are suddenly becoming popular because of a silly little computer game called the Kerbal Space Program.
     c. NASA software. Under the CAP banner, we can actually request a slew of tools from the NASA software catalog. This is another one of those best kept secrets we don't talk about because we don't know about them.
     d. Techsoup software. This covers everything from Adobe to Microsoft, and let's people deploy a computer lab at a fraction of the price they might otherwise be able to.

Now, why are these carrots? (and how do we make sure people are joining to use these tools for CAP and not other things?) The good news is that a lot of IT people can be bought for the price of shiny objects to work on. Not own, not be the name on the wall, just work on shiny objects.

[tangent]
That means we need to buy shiny objects sometimes, like lots of ram and solid state drives for issued computers. I bought 4 laptops 2 years ago out of my own pocket and upgraded them to 8/16GB RAM and 120GB SSDs because it shaved an hour off the windows update portion of the cyberpatriot competition. That cost me under $1000 (2 thinkpad x201, 2 w510 models.) Did you know that when you then put refurbished SSDs in the optical drive slot instead and run the VM on that channel the windows updates for the competition images go even faster? The cadets know this now...)

Now I have 2 issued CAP laptops that were sent to me with 4GB RAM and a 32-bit OS on them.

The good news, I got permission to nuke the OS from wing and install 64 bit OSs on them. I got squadron approval to spend $100 on maxing the ram in both machines.
[/tangent]

The point of that tangent is that for one year I put $1k into CAP and got $20k in return. I like that rate of return.

And tech people think that way a lot.

I realize I skipped a portion on part 1: Why we need an IT plan.

Our laptops need to remain "mission-ready," that is, when we are engaging in activities and missions, I need to be able to hand off laptops to the teams and know that:
1. The system is updated fully.
2. The system is secured to the best of my ability.
3. The system has all necessary IT resources the mission/activity needs.
4. The system has a backup on file.
5. The system has a failsafe plan.

The lack of guidance in CAPP on this meant that I had a lot of catching up to do. Setting dates on my calendar to watch Patch Tuesday carefully, building group policies, learning how to use windows SCM and the localGPO tool it has to do that in our non-domain environment, adding our crisis plan and cap regs to each laptop, creating users for each laptop and teaching users where resources are, creating bookmarks with links to all relevant resources when used as an internet connected device, backing up files to google drive, and preparing LPS Linux on CDs to use in case of a hard disk failure and USB drives with extra copies of necessary files.

In addition to this:

I need to build a curriculum for Cyberpatriot training. I am unashamed to say that I use the training slides they give us only when I had no time to prepare my own lecture that boils down to how to use the scientific method in conjunction with google to solve problems. But I need to keep coming up with new problems.

Then I also have web design and maintenance to take care of.

And teaching new users how to use CAP apps on google. Every time I see a cap.gov email with a survey question or registration that is NOT using google forms and is relying on individual email responses that need to be manually updated in a spreadsheet, I feel we IT officers have failed our users.

If I don't have a squadron IT plan, the chances of me forgetting to do one of these things? Pretty good to nearly certain.

Right now I'm behind on my projects, and I was thinking: What happens if I take 3 months off from my CAP stuff? I'm replacing carpet and a water heater in my house over the next 3 months, so more personal time is needed.

Then I realized that my trello board is my continuity book, and that the only other IT officer we have is leaving our squadron next month (moving across the state.) Hence a good portion of the above info talking about how to recruit IT people.

I suspect that after a short push on this front using the carrots I mentioned that I should have 5 new people online in short order after advertising this in appropriate areas.

Next up, I would suggest writing the pamphlet requirements with some fuzziness on Cyberpatriot; specifically, make it read that we would need to be a coach/mentor/assistant in a nationally recognized cyber-security competition the cadets participate in. That way when the AFA changes CyberPatriot to CyberCommando you don't have to update the regs (see the NRA badge in captalk history for an example of how this can go poorly.)

I would also suggest that OPSEC/INFOSEC not be removed from the pamphlet: It should be expanded to having the IT officer giving quarterly updates to cadets and SMs on how to use encryption, how to use 2-factor authentication with google apps, how to spot scams, and how to protect our confidential data, along with learning how to separate publicly releasable data from confidential data in an effort to help the PAO/PIOs.

Further thoughts on expanding this can be found here: http://www.af.mil/cybersecurity.aspx

As an aside, I especially like the updated purple dragon patch on there.

Another suggestion is that IT officers either take point or brief PAO/PIOs on how to give presentations WRT protecting critical infrastructure. There are a lot of resources out there that individuals and business owners just don't know about. If we do this right, CAP can become instrumental across the nation in helping to implement PPD-8 and EO 13636. I'd like to envision a point where we got CAP IT respected to the point of being a viable cyber incident responder. It's good to have dreams, right?

Anyhow, these are my current and somewhat disjointed thoughts on the subject. I now return to figuring out what the next thing is on my house that is planning on breaking.

[JC004]

...
Now I have 2 issued CAP laptops that were sent to me with 4GB RAM and a 32-bit OS on them.
...

What is with the 32 bit OSs anyway? 

[SarDragon]

Olde, and cheap.

[Holding Pattern]

Olde, and cheap.

Nope. Since windows 7 at least, Windows product keys are interchangable between bitness.

[JC004]

I didn't think the machines were very old.  I'd have to check.

[Holding Pattern]

I didn't think the machines were very old.  I'd have to check.

The machines aren't old. They are just being shipped with 32-bit OSs because OEMs think that 4GB ram will NEVER need to run a 64 bit OS...

[JeffDG]

I didn't think the machines were very old.  I'd have to check.

The machines aren't old. They are just being shipped with 32-bit OSs because OEMs think that 4GB ram will NEVER need to run a 64 bit OS...

And basically throw 25% of your RAM down the crapper.  32-bit Win7 can address 3 GB of RAM, leaving your fourth completely useless.