How to fuck with airports - a 1 step guide for (Redmond) terrorists.
Q: How do you cause an 800-plane pile-up at a major airport? A: Replace working Unix systems with Microsoft Windows 2000! Details: http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2275 ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. /|\ \|/ :They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country /\|/\ <--*-->:and our people, and neither do we." -G. W. Bush, 2004.08.05 \/|\/ /|\ : \|/ + v + : War is Peace, freedom is slavery, Bush is President. -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sunder wrote:
Q: How do you cause an 800-plane pile-up at a major airport? A: Replace working Unix systems with Microsoft Windows 2000!
Details: http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2275
Got to love the spin... "The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times." That would be 49.710269618055555555555555555556 days, or (curiously enough) 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF) milliseconds. Known problem with Win95 ('cept they call Win95 a "server"). -- Roy M. Silvernail is roy@rant-central.com, and you're not "It's just this little chromium switch, here." - TFS SpamAssassin->procmail->/dev/null->bliss http://www.rant-central.com
At 11:37 AM 9/28/2004, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
Got to love the spin...
"The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times." That would be 49.710269618055555555555555555556 days, or (curiously enough) 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF) milliseconds. Known problem with Win95 ('cept they call Win95 a "server").
I've heard some people say that there was a different problem that was causing them to need to reboot about that often, having to do with the applications rather than the core OS, but I don't know enough of the details to be sure. Either way, if they knew the system was going to crash every 49.7 days, and they had a process to have a technician reboot it every 30 days, and the technician shuts it down during quiet nighttime hours, that guarantees that the 49.7 day crash will be at a _bad_ time of day. They could at _least_ have done a workaround that tells the system to shut itself down at 2am on Day 45, after giving the operators a warning about "Hey, I need to shut myself down for an hour for maintenance some time in the next 4 days, is now a good time? Yes/No/Wait-5-min/Wait-1-hour" Disclaimer: I worked on the FAA's AAS debacle in the 80s (fortunately not on the unlucky "winning" contractor's team), and a number of my coworkers worked on VSCS projects - not sure if they won that round, or who their partners were.
On Tue, 2004-09-28 at 14:37, Roy M. Silvernail wrote:
"The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times." That would be 49.710269618055555555555555555556 days, or (curiously enough) 4294967295 (0xFFFFFFFF) milliseconds. Known problem with Win95 ('cept they call Win95 a "server").
How the heck do they keep a Win95 machine up for 49 days? I think 1 day is a more realistic MTBF.
On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 03:06:54PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
Either way, if they knew the system was going to crash every 49.7 days, and they had a process to have a technician reboot it every 30 days,
If I knew somebody delivered me a mission critical system like that, I'd sue. The system required a human in the loop to periodically do action XY, or it would reliably fail? And the system before didn't? And it wasn't there as a fallback? The mind boggles. Even more interesting: how many heads have rolled due to this? -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07078, 11.61144 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE http://moleculardevices.org http://nanomachines.net [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature]
At 8:28 AM +0200 9/29/04, Eugen Leitl wrote:
The mind boggles. Even more interesting: how many heads have rolled due to this?
None, of course. Microsoft is the new IBM. As in, "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft..." Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
participants (6)
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Bill Stewart -
Eugen Leitl -
R. A. Hettinga -
Roy M. Silvernail -
Steve Furlong -
Sunder