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From Bad To Worse, At Taxpayer Expense
By Greg L | 7 May 2008 | Prince William County | 55 Comments
UPDATE: The entire Prince William County IT infrastructure becomes unreachable sometime around 3:00PM and remained down until 4:40PM. Intermittent service disruptions are continuing through the evening.
The website for Prince William County Government is a lot prettier than it used to be, but it’s even more difficult to navigate than ever before. The search feature only returns broken links, and page navigation remains just as byzantine as it ever was. This taxpayer-funded website “upgrade” seems to be nothing more than a new skin for the old website, with some broken features added on for good measure. This is ridiculous.
Prince William County taxpayers pay millions of dollars to maintain this internet resource. I’d provide a link for taxpayers to see for themselves just how much this costs us, but I can no longer find the budget on the county website and the old link I had saved for the budget is now broken. To the best of my recollection, website maintenance for the county was a three million dollar budget item for fiscal 2009. For what we have, I’d say the value we’re getting for our taxpayer dollars is pretty negligible.
County taxpayers are quite simply getting ripped off here. It’s well past time to outsource this to a company that actually has some proven ability to provide information to the public and understands that taxpayers care little for prettiness, and everything for actual functionality. Government is supposed to work, after all.
UPDATE: as of 3:15PM, the domain name servers for the county (NS2.co.prince-william.va.us and NS3.co.prince-william.va.us) are down. The whole internet infrastructure for the county is now unreachable. Nice going, guys.
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55 Comments
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I get a DNS error when I click the link.
Even better. Now I’m getting that also. Not only can they manage to screw up a website “upgrade”, but they managed to trash the DNS in the middle of a workday as well. These folks are pathetic.
The URL for http://www.co.prince-william.va.us doesn’t resolve, nor does http://www.pwcgov.org. They brought down the entire suite of websites. Nice going.
It is almost as if their server is off line. I didn’t use the site much anyway because it was hard to navigate. Obviously someone without much GUI design experience is doing it.
The whole system crashed. Now we can’t access PCE complaint forms. You can’t even access the library system.
Medic - glad to see you! Welcome back!
I hereby declare that the Homeland Security Advisory System is now Orange…
Breaking:
“Principi’s major office renovation knocks entire County’s web service out…”
Tom,
That’s funny.
If Principi is involved, maybe we should go to Code Red.
Tom! Come back to Homeland Security! Skeletor (Chertoff) has us in his evil grip!
I keep getting an Oops! page. Is that an adequate description of the County’s new web page?
Maybe someone should check the City of Manassas and the City of Manassas Park web pages to see if they are down.
[Ed note: Manassas and Fairfax County are experiencing no issues. Fairfax uses the same domain structure as Prince William, so this is not a Virginia issue, but a Prince William County one.]
Doing some checking, it seems like the entire externally-facing network infrastructure has fallen down. No publicly-accessible IP addresses are responding and the DNS seems to be only intermittently available, at best.
This is either a massive screw-up by the Office of Information Technology, or a significant hacker attack.
Netcraft reports that the web servers were running MS Server 2000 with IIS version 5 last time they queried. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a vulnerability exploit that was made possible when they started transitioning to the “upgraded” website.
Anyone interested in submitting a FOIA for the Root Cause Analysis of the site failure? =)
That’s it, Code Red! Heading to the bunker…
On a more serious note, anyone know if this has extended to our non-redundant communications system our first responders operate on?
I’ve been trying to get in to the county system since about noon today with no success. I figure it is somehow related to the “upgrade”. Why I am I not surprised?
Maybe Princip is using his “crisis management” skills (Principi is Hero PWC, W.H.Westhoff, Potomac News, 5/7/08). Demo sources tell he had to bring his Mother from California to work in his office. We are sooo lucky in Woodbridge to have a “crisis manager” and a Moma’s boy to be our Supervisor….
Anyone look at the OIT budget? Well you can’t because the link is DEAD!
This link will take you there.
http://www.regionalchamber.org/public_policy/documents/PWCFY2009Budget.pdf
It’s a conspiracy to make Corey Stewart look bad by county staff.
The conspiracy is nothing new. It’s the ‘ol ABC, isn’t it a little too late for that?
Someone needs to tell them (CS) if you’re not part of the solution than you’re part of the problem.
correction THEN you are part of the problem.
documented,
I spoke w/ Principi’s mom when I called to register my complaints about his decision to try and get the ROL rescinded. It is clear that being from Mexifornia, she is NOT at all happy with a no-enforcement approach. We had quite the convo about it, it was pretty funny. Things would have been better if Momma’s boy Principi had actually listened to his mother…..
Greg, All,
It is 10:20 p.m. and now when I try to access the pwcgov website is says “service unavailble.” I guess that’s better than the Oops page.
Be thankful none of you all need that system to get your JOB done. The system goes down like this a few times a year. This is nothing new. Stop crying!
Patty,
FYI-System is working just fine now. Try again!
And at 11:06 pm, it’s down again.
“Service Unavailable” - if that’s not ironic - PWC, Service Unavailable.
County Assessments and Other secure county systems are both working fine.
Try this direct link for Assessments…
http://www4.pwcgov.org/realestate/landrover.asp
It is working just fine for me. I am using some direct links and not the overall generic county home page.
Good luck. No problems for the above stated.
Maybe you have to show proof of citizenship to use the site.
[i]The website for Prince William County Government is a lot prettier than it used to be, but it’s even more difficult to navigate than ever before.[/i]
Agreed. There was a time when the search was the best way to find things on the site. These days the results range from irrelevant to totally useless. For example, I was trying to find the form for getting my well tested. There used to be an orphaned page that had a link to the form. Searching for something like ‘bacteria test’ or ‘lead test’ would give you a link to the page. Maybe it is there but I can’t spend all day looking so I called and had them mail me the form. The lady that I spoke to told me that I shouldn’t bother looking on the site because things just disappear and then reappear randomly.
BTW, and this is from experience, Google does a poor job of indexing a website that is entirely reliant on internal links because their ranking algorithm relies on link counts. There are much better technologies that will return much more relevant results based on natural language.
Interestingly enough I found this searching for ‘lead test’….
http://www.pwcgov.org/jobs/applynow/vacancy.asp?intVacancyID=3428
Is there any possibility that this would have been a scheduled outage? I mean i looked this morning and saw a new website that I had not seen before. it looks better at close look.
The County job opening for a Sr. Application Developer at the rate of pay offered will only attract foreign born and educated workers.
At about 7:15 AM on 8 May 2008, I searched the entire Prince William County site for “Budget” using the search tool at the home page http://www.co.prince-william.va.us/.
One of the hits it returned was
Prince William County, Virginia
Abstract:
www.pwcgov.org/budget - 7k
Clicking this link returned this page:
The page you are looking for cannot be located.
The Prince William County web site has been recently redesigned to provide greater access to information and services.
If you have previously book marked a page on the old web site, you should take the time to review our web site and revise your bookmarks to the documents new location.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may create, however we are sure you will find the new site more useful in finding just the information and services you are interested in.
Sincerely,
PWC Webmaster
Skynet became self aware on 3:00 PM Wednesday, May 7th, 2008. It immediately launched a full scale assault on mankind. It’s first act - shutting down the PWC website.
Sarah Conner, where are you?
I just got this in an email from PWC.
On May 7, 2008 Prince William County launched the County’s redesigned web site.
If you previously saved County web pages in your ‘Favorites’ folder, the old web link probably does not function on the redesigned web site. If you need to re-establish your favorite Building Development Division links, please visit the Division’s homepage at http://www.pwcgov.org/bdd.
Sincerely,
Eric M. Mays, P.E.
Building Official
Prince William County
703-792-6873
emays@pwcgov.org
Howdee Loudoun, I guess your the only one that missed me
/\/\3|)iç 64 (Winner of the BVBL 40k and 50k post award)
Loudoun isn’t the only one who missed you. Last time I saw you post, I asked you where you’ve been. You said you were busy. I hope you get the 60k post award. I missed you too.
Not true Doc. Not true at all.
The new site is ugly. The Quick Links text is unreadable. You have to highlight the text in order to read them. the transparent drop down menus are also very difficult to read.
I can’t imagine this site meets ADA sect. 508 requirements. Now what will they have to pay to redesign their redesign?
They seem to be working okay on my computer, Scott.
Why is the county spending millions on its web site, and who knows how much for this “upgrade” when the economy and county finances are in a shambles? The old web site worked fine and everyone had their links set, which they must now change. The county is laying off people and cutting programs that actually provided value to the citizens. Now we get this bovine scatology.
The only explanation is County Executive Gerhart’s enormous ego and incompetence.
The budget process is a joke. Gerhart’s office provides the supervisors and their committees the proposed fiscal plan (budget) with only about a month to study it and ask questions, after his office has been working on it and figuring out how best to obfuscate the document for months. The document is vague and provides no detail on what’s in the base budget (such as this web site nonsense). The budget office takes their time responding to citizens’ questions, often not responding until after the BOCS must make its final vote.
The goal of the County Executive’s Office is to get what they want and *&$^ the supervisors and citizens.
This process must change so the citizens and their elected supervisors get control of spending in the County! The tax rate would undoubtedly be lower if the citizens and their elected representatives knew what they were buying in detail and could cull out spending that only serves the interests of County Executive Gerhart and his cronies. This issue transcends party affiliation and political beliefs. All of the supervisors must demand detailed information on how the County is spending our money so we can make the decisions.
Patty,
Thanks for the kind words. I just got aggravated and instead of taking it out here, I made a leave of absence.
I am not sure who made the 60k post because it wasn’t posted on the front page.
Rob,
Thanks!! We have to get together with Lafayette and Loudoun for coffee again. I need to get started on that sight as well. Just so much to do and not enough hours in the day to do it.
/\/\3|)iç 64 (Winner of the BVBL 40k and 50k post award) said on 8 May 2008 at 4:00 pm:
We must get together soon!! I agree the just aren’t enough hours in the day.
I’ve missed your comments too.
Lafayette - glad to see you back as well!
Lafayette - ditto (I’m glad too).
Hey, Lafayette! I was just asking a mutual friend about you yesterday. I understand that you’re working about 26 hours a day. Other than that, how have you been?
I have lowered HSAS back to yellow…we have vacated the bunker…the VP has gone back to being lonely and posting on BVBL….
Grrrr…. it’s down AGAIN.
Sheeesh not sight but site. LOL…too tired
Patty, Loudoun & AWC,
Thanks. I just dropped in quickly. This thread caught my eye. I was unable to work for a couple of hours yesterday.
AWC,
I’m just hangin’ in there. I did escape to WVA last weekend. I hope all is well with you and yours.
Mr. Medic,
Don’t forget the wildflowers this weekend. Dolph is picking me up early to get a good selection.
http://www.vnps.org/chapters/princewilliam/2008/04/prince-william-wildflower-society-april.html
Site is still down.
Maureen,
Try again. I was able to file zoning complaint online.
WooHoo! The site was up for 5 whole minutes … but it’s down again.
I certainly hope that whomever is responsible for this is still at work and not keeping banker’s hours.
From the site: “Welcome to the SECOND day of the new Prince William County Web site! We hope you enjoy exploring the redesigned site.”
Grin.
Lafayette:
Good to see ya again.
I’m sure the website was already in the works for a while; probably funded during better times and this is the fruit of their labor.
Q: I put in a couple of zoning complaints and the inspector wants me to fill out another questionnaire and arrange for a face to face meeting with her. I never had to do that before-anyone else run into this?
es_la_ley,
Thanks. Have you been to Playtime at their temporary location yet? I hope to check them this weekend or next.
jfk,
If your complaint was for overcrowding in the county, they are taking a stronger approach to investigating these cases.
Che’,
Good one on Skynet. Have you heard if the series was renewed or not?
I tried to get on different links within the neighborhood services part of the website this afternoon and guess what? It didn’t work.