SGTMcClain dot Net

I know being a soldier I really shouldn’t be critical of the way our systems our setup but I think if we aren’t vocal about things like this they never get changed and they ultimately get worse.

Someone please explain to me why the military waits until one day to put out all of the active duty W-2’s for the Army Navy and Airforce? 

I wonder if the people running MyPay understand what a denial of service attack is, because I am sure thats whats happening today, but wait I am getting ahead of myself.  Today I went to get check to see if my W-2 was posted since they had been anouncing that they would be posted on the 20th of January (Today) for all active duty Army, Navy, and Air Force Service members.  Now I am a computer geek and it didn’t even cross my mind about what this meant, but basically there are hundreds of thousands of military personell and spouses trying to check MyPay right now to get their W-2’s so that they can get started on filing their taxes.

Now for my explaination of a Denial of Service attack (DoS) (fellow geeks please don’t beat me up but I am going to try to make this understandable for everyone). 

A Denial of Service attack is basically what someone would to, to bring down a website, you see most web servers can only handle a certain amount of traffic at one time, and if you exceed that amount of traffic the website can not be accessed by anyone new trying to access the site.  This can happen naturally (most times called the digg effect) when a site is really popular in a short period of time.  However a person can also do this to maliciously bring down a site using a botnet (think of it as a lot of computers that they can control remotely) thus making it unaccessable.

Well my point is why in the world would you post the W-2’s of a few hundred thousand service memebers on the same day, why not spread it out over the course of a few days I am sure thier servers do not scale and their IT guys are having one heck of a time keeping up with the server load.

Ok I guess my rant is over but if you work for or know someone who works for MyPay please talk to them about this issue I am sure it only happens like this one day a year and by at least spreading out the deployment of W-2’s they can avoid having outages without having to spend more taxpayer money on servers or bandwidth.