Slashdot Mirror
Space Station BSOD
Lostman writes: "CNN has an article that details a computer glitch that has occured at the international space station. The problem disrupted all communication from the command computers on the station. Although NASA knows that this was because an onboard server had crashed, the cause of this was not immediately known." See also space.com, the BBC, or NASA's status update. NASA is using Windows for most of their computing functions, as mentioned here.
If you read the logs that the post links to, you see the mention of "wrestling" with Unix commands. I don't see any indication of blame, Windows or Unix.
Erm - with a camera? Sounds like you need to take a little Away From Keyboard time. Computers aren't the only reality, dontcha know.
Yeah.... heh.. just imagine if it was Win XP and they needed to do a re-install. They would have to wait until moring to talk to an MS help desk moneky to get the authorization code to install it. Good job MS :)
The only way files "get put in the wrong place during backup" is if the _user_ screws up while using NT's backup software. How this affects NT's stability or has anything to do with said networking problem is beyond me. Anyone who has used NTBackup will know how to easily fix this.
Like most Windows problems, it's the user. Really.
i dont think ive ever seen a 386 with a fan on it.
and if this whole crash is NT related like the article suggests, why hasnt anyone pointed out that you CANNOT run NT on a 386
What is the connection with Microsoft here? Just that you once read in the past that Windows was used on some computers, and now it seems NASA has had trouble with their Command and Control computer number 1? Does this seem logically complete to all of you? Do you not require perhaps more information in order to draw any conclusions at all? If one reads page "2-5", or page 40 of 399, of International Space Station Familiarization you will begin to learn several things: 1) The Command and Control systems onboard the International Space Station (ISS) appear to be custom designed systems using custom NASA software and hardware. 2) Crew interface with the "Command and Control (C&C) U.S. systems" is via several "Portable Computer System (PCS)" laptops that run the "Solaris UNIX operating system". 3) The "Windows 95 operating system" is used on several "Station Support Computer (SSC)" laptops. Does this mean that Windows 95 was at fault? Doubtful given that the problem is apparently with the Command and Control computers, and the SSC laptops that run Win95 are not even used for crew interface to the Command and Control systems, nor was any mention made of SSC problems. Does it mean that Solaris was at fault? Doubtful, given that problem was not stated as a problem with the crew's interface to the Command and Control systems. Nope, if anything... this would seem to be a glitch that has to do with custom systems and custom software. Any slashdotters want to try to prove otherwise, and fully and completely state how Microsoft has any involvement or responsibility in this matter? Do each of you really get that much of a thrill from jumping to ill-reasoned conclusions in some pathetic attempt to slander Microsoft? Forget that, I know the answer to that last question. Sorry, it is Slashdot and all.
Since students are given access to NT source code I don't expect the military or NASA have problems. Microsoft Windows NT source code has been available to University researchers (including students) for years, they do need to sign a license but they are allowed to publish and the license is transferable if they move to another University. At least this was the state of things several years ago when a friend was on such a project.
>>> if Endeavour hadn't happenedto be docked, /at all/.
>>> they'd have no voice/date uplink
No, they'd just look out the window, figure out
what region (1, 2, or 3) they were over, and then
punch up the appropriate frequency on 2 meters,
and I'm sure they'd get patched back to Houston
very quickly. Like they did before...
Windows is a 'other' operating system you fucking idiot.
The Command and Control (C&C) systems on the International Space Station (ISS) are apparently custom NASA systems. The crew interfaces with the C&C systems through software on one of several laptops referred to as a Portable Computer System (PCS). These PCS laptops run Solaris.
Windows 95 is run on separate laptops referred to as Station Support Computers (SSC). From the documentation I cited, these SSC laptops are apparently not involved in any interface capacity with the C&C systems that are apparently demonstrating a problem.
I have read other commentary, however, which seems to indicate that these laptops are configured for a dual-boot (either Solaris or Windows). In one such report, as I recall, the individual was receiving all sorts of errors under Solaris and in order to determine if there was a hardware error he rebooted into Windows. Apparently Windows came up clean.
Once you, Slashdot, or any other individual finds conclusive evidence that Microsoft Windows was somehow involved in the problems associated with the C&C systems... then you can justifiably bash Microsoft.
This just gives credence to my theory that the Troll High Council is the Slashdot editors themselves.
It was in the news a while back that they took a plyer and DVDs abord the ISS. What region were they? Or did only the US crew get to watch movies?
I wouldn't want to oversimplify whatever situation is going on up there. Somehow, I doubt that they are running Windows on their main computers, but stranger things have happened. A quick skim through the crew logs shows that they have had problems with the network before. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the computers are among the cheapest bits on the station.
;-) I think a lot of people have succumbed to the idea that software failure is normal, and that there isn't anything you can do about it.. That's definitely an attitude that should change..
At least there is a separation for life support and some of the other more critical systems (though you'd think that satellite tracking and rudimentary communication would be separate as well..)
This reminds me of a couple of things. I recall that one time, the space shuttle didn't launch because a bunch of computers (8 or 9) detected some sort of fault, and called the launch a `no-go.' There was another computer made by a different company that was looking at the same data, but it put up a `go' status. It turned out that the other computers were wrong -- the situation had indeed been a `go.' The parallel here is that the station has three command and control computers that are basically identical, and apparently running the same software. The software is probably a single point of failure..
I wonder if the problem is because they are running some sort of monolithic application that can pretty much do everything. It's probably better to have a number of individual processes -- that way, if one thing crashes or goes completely nuts, the operating system can prevent them from knocking out other processes.
I also heard from one report or another that the issue was with connecting to the database -- another potential single point of failure.
Hmm.. Maybe we can still blame this on Microsoft
Of course, if you have mostly-good software interacting with mostly-good hardware, some really bad things can occasionally happen, as we've seen with the hard disk corruption problems that have been cropping up with Linux 2.4 and VIA motherboard chipsets..
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I think they've actually been having trouble for a few days. The test of the arm had already been pushed back due to software troubles..
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- CHOICE
/T:Y,5 Reinstall life support
The question mark and the key choices of [Y/N] appear by default (though the key choices are configurable). And, the "/T:Y,5" bit configures CHOICE to automatically default to "Y" if no key is chosen within 5 seconds (I figured that would be kinda helpful, given that it is life support we're talking about here).P.S. I'm looking for a new job in Web Development. I invite you to check out my portfolio of hand coded HTML / JavaScript / CSS.
Alex Bischoff
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Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Oh... wait a sec! :-)
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
Here's a great article by Fast Company about the decidedly unglamorous world of programming for space flight purposes: They Write the Right Stuff
It kinda answers the question "what could software look like if somebody tried to do *everything* right?"
Hmmm. 3 laptops running Win95 and one NT server. Gee, why does that ring a bell somehow?
(Insert obligatory "The Register" had this story ages ago).
But, more interestingly was the picture they received, previous to this event, of a laptop aboard the station going a little, umm, strange:
Here it is
There is no mention what OS the thinkpad in the picture is running. For all we know that might be the "server" they are talking about... http://www.mdrobotics.ca/rws.htm
The web site runs linux, though... :)
STFU about slashdot bias.
The Linux machine they were using was only for a single experiment, studying plant growth, I believe.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Look at the register They have a comment from a NASA guy that they are running Solaris on the 486 Thinkpads. QuoteThe IBM Thinkpad laptops to which you refer, called PCS (Portable Computer System) are used throughout the station. They are indeed 486 based laptops. However, they are running Sun's Solaris OS for x86, and the OpenWindows WM, and a custom application that provides a graphical interface to the various on-board systems.
Help fight continental drift.
From the article:
If the problem persists, NASA could extend the mission by a day or two.
Now, could Microsoft please recalculate the "Total Cost of Ownership for NASA ?
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Don't use nuclear weapons to troubleshoot faults.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Can you imagine what MS marketing will make out of this if this turns out to be a Linux box ? (they have been aboard shuttles, so why not on the station).
My point here is that mentioning MS now, should absolutely not be considered MS bashing, but rather just mentioning the obvious. That MS server *do* crash for no apparent reason, a fact that you can't find mentioned anywhere on this site.
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Don't use nuclear weapons to troubleshoot faults.
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
My immediate thought was that it was a Solaris based server. I remember when I first heard that IBM Thinkpad 760's were going on the ISS ( I use a 760 still ) and being a OS/2 advocate I wanted to see what OS was going up there. Sure enough they put Windows on the x86 laptops but Solaris was on the mission critical systems and Windows was just for email and other comm uses. I think there was a NT server though. It was the for the Windows laptops. If this was a Solaris based server and they didn't put much effort into the redundancy issues then Sun really should take most of the heat since my experience is that they really don't go down much at all. Now if it was a Microsoft OS based server and they still didn't do much redundancy work then shame on NASA for using a product KNOWN to not stay running for very long.
Note: When we were building a Solaris based system for Atlas V launch systems ( used Java too ) we had a OS configuration/hardware issue that had all the Microsoft advocates chanting about using Windows. Then I mentioned that this was the first OS based issue we've had in the entire development effort. They shut up. Funny how it's common and accepted for Windows to screw up and management doesn't care. Because Microsoft apps don't run on *nix systems they want to rip it out at the first chance....Ignorance or what! )
I hope we find out because this kind of PR will only force the offending parties to do better work next time. Unless it really is Microsoft, they'll say NASA needs to put up a new space station running Windows 2000 or heXPee. IMHO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
At least he will be leaving. Microsofts operating systems and software isn't leaving any time soon. I'll bet there won't be too much of a delay in pulling it all out and replacing it with Linux after they realize how disruptive IT really is.
;)
My guess is that it'll take about 3 crashes before the server is replace with Linux or Solaris. Probably 5-10 issues with the client machines before many of those go.
Then again they could just not use them and just have a screen saver running. They'll still have to reboot them every few days or so but that could be put into the regular schedule.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Well ya got me, it I wouldn't have been working on actual ISS hardware, but the hardware that was used to simulate actual ISS hardware. The simulation hardware, from what I understood, was all written on 386s in assembly. This was for low-level networking code.
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That's not what I meant.
I intervewied at Boeing for doing Space Station networking work.....here's the surprising part, the Space Station is all run off of 386s!!! They do most of the low level programming in assembly to squueze out as much performance as possible.
It totally blew my mind. This was about 14 months ago.
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That's not what I meant.
Let's just hope they have the original 'install disks' ready and at hand when they come to swap out anything that breaks.
And a good comms method to get their new install key.
NASA is using Windows for most of their computing functions,
In that case forget it. I'm not setting foot on that death trap! I think I'd rather take my chances on Mir! Oh wait, too late....
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
That only makes sense if you choose an operating system that's been tested by the public and has actually had the bugs fixed. :-)
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
But I'll have to dig out my tape of ``The Day The Earth Stood Still'' to be absolutely sure. (I am positive about ``Klaatu'', though.)
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
There was a bit of news a couple of years ago about some weenie at NASA who issued an edict that only Windows systems should be used. Of course, all of those tried-and-true applications that were successfully running on Macintosh, UNIX, and other systems were destined for the trash can after that order was issued. Looks like our space program is now beginning to see the fruits of that wise decision.
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CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
SHIP'S LOG 29 DEC
We are apparently out of memory space on the disk, although we're not sure exactly how NT manages its memory.
SHIP'S LOG 22 FEB
At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
"NT played no role in the Yorktown?s LAN crash, Baker said."
Surely you read the paragraphs that immediately follow your quote:
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Great...so the ISS is really a giant pinball machine with one of the flippers locked up, so we need to get it to go "TILT" and shut down so we can reset it? :-)
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Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Judging by the previous umpteen Slashdot discussions, there's no evidence that the OS went blue (and it shouldn't have if it was usermode code).
Someone posted that military installations often lack the "Reset" switch, so any software failure requires being dragged back into port to fix it.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, the during the timeperiod I'm thinking of we had about an equal number of NetWare (3.1x) and NT (3.5x) machines. It's true that later I saw many many more NT 4.0 bluescreens (mainly because 4.0 was inferior to 3.5x as a server OS) and very few if any NetWare 4.1x abends.
I guess I was just reflecting on how NW was sorta the NT of it's day - ubiquitous and not as bulletproof as we might remember it.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Sorry for apparenlty misreading your post, but I'm not sure what you mean by "OS crashing" if not a kernel crash.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Microsoft did a study of NT 4.0 downtime causes, and the results were split about evenly between "Hardware/Drivers", "Internal OS Problem", with quite a bit of "Administrator Error" thrown in.
So, on NT4, at least, 99% of BSODs were not caused by hardware or driver problems. More like 50% of the non-preventable stuff.
For more information, you'll have to dig out the 1999-era copy of InfoWorld where this was published.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Netware 3.12
Yeah, memory protection is for wusses.
Seriously, tho, in a former life as a network guy in the early 90s, I saw far more NetWare ABENDs than I've saw NT Bluescreens. It was generally OK file+print, but if you tried to run any slightly non-standard NLM (AppleShare, OS2 namespace, backup software, btrieve, CD-ROM drivers, etc) you had to keep your fingers crossed. I guess that goes to show if you keep a product in maintenance for 10 years or more, anything can become rock stable.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
XFree86 drivers run as root and have full access to your systems memory. Poorly coded user space X drivers could easily crash your system.
NT servers don't use the Nvidia drivers and aren't expected to do things like optimize video playback. They generally run a rather generic unaccellerated SVGA driver. I've seen lots of bluescreens on servers, and none of them that I recall could be traced to the video drivers. There's the usual SCSI and NIC driver issues that could crash any OS, and for a long time in the NT 4.0 series, there was some issue in NTFS.SYS that caused systems to fall over.
I'll accept that it's somewhat stupid to have a mandatory GUI on a server, but I don't think this is the stablility issue that the NT-haters club makes it out to be. NT has/had plenty of larger reliablity problems.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
What the hell are they using Windows for then?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
How come I always read the news on the register before I read it here?
It sounds really rather scary to me. Apart from the fact that three redundant computers going down at once just should NOT happen - if Endeavour hadn't happenedto be docked, they'd have no voice/date uplink /at all/.
Three redundant computers did not, actually, go down. ONE of the Command and Data Handling computers shut itself down, and Cmdr. Helms was unable to shunt functions it performed through the other two computers on the first day of troubleshooting. So, only one was actually down; the other two were part of the problem, or part of the solution, depending on your point of view, but they were not actually "down".
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lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
It's too late now, but at least this will be in the story when it gets archived.
There are more than 100 computers on the space station, just counting built-in. Indeed, each individual experiment rack -- about the size of an apartment fridge -- will include its own computer and custom software written for that experiment, all intended to link into the ISS network for data transmission and science interface. Many of the racks in Destiny (and future modules like Columbus and Kibo) provide station functions such as robot arm control, and each of these has its own computer as well.
But the core functions are called CDH (Command and Data Handling), including everything from navigation to turning the lights on and off: really, it's just the network infrastructure. Cabling is Thinnet. These computers are provided to NASA under contract by Honeywell, and are called MDMs, for Multiplexer/Demultiplexer. Think of a rack-mount swappable-processor system and you'll be close. These run the RTOS (Real Time Operating System) called VxWorks (from Wind River) -- the same RTOS used on the successful Mars Pathfinder mission, and custom software written by Honeywell and specific system vendors using Matrixx from the same vendor.
The crew use laptops, and there are quite a number of them judging by photographs, many seemingly permanently linked into one or more MDM functions. Since the MDMs have no other interface to the crew, this makes sense. The laptops that link to the MDMs use Sun Solaris and a custom client that provides data feedback and a semi-graphical user interface, depending on function. These laptops go by the generic name PCS (Portable Computer System) and conform to specifications set during the mid-1990s. The PCS model in use is the IBM Thinkpad, and contrary to popular belief, these models have evolved along with the Shuttle and Station programs -- just more slowly than the commercial market. Models need to be constructed with higher-quality components and undergo flight qualification. The laptops available to Expedition One were (I believe) at least Pentium I-MMX class machines.
Some of these laptops are dual-boot with Windows NT on the other partition. Windows NT does have a function on the space station, but it is in no way linked to the command and control systems as outlined above. The major purpose it serves seems to be e-mail, but probably also record-keeping and recreation in the form of games or playing portable media such as CDs or DVDs. (There is also a built-in DVD player in one module that the astronauts can gather around for "movie night".) Windows NT can behave perfectly well when given a known, well-defined set of hardware and a well-tweaked configuration. The astronauts have access to spare hard drives that have images created on Earth using Norton Ghost. In one incident during Expedition One this was insufficient, and a spare hard drive was sent up during the current shuttle mission in order to bring that laptop back into service. But since they have plenty, it probably did not materially affect operations to be missing one.
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lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
sllort asks:
Now what do you guys make of this?
... This would have been much easier with some bootable media that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that "other" operating system).
According to this Expedition One crew debriefing, Shep answered a provocative question thus:
Ops LAN
? Was the service pack distribution system easy to follow?
Shep: Yes. No problems.
Sergei: I'd like to have a little more explanation of what is in the service pack.
Shep & Sergei: That way we would have known if it was really critical to load the new version or not.
? Was the desktop configuration (SSC Client, SSC File Server) easy to navigate? Any suggestions on how to improve the desktop layout?
o Shep (joking): Go to a Mac OS.
This fits with the wording: Shep is a Mac user. The log is tweaking him for being less technical because he uses a Mac. It's unclear if this section of the log was written by one of the cosmonauts, or possibly Shep tweaking himself. But he's known to have a real sense of humor.
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lake effect weblog
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
Wasn't there a big stink about how they were using open source (esp. Linux) on board?
Jethro
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Then that would be a picture, not a screenshot...
What?
There is no indication of an actual BSOD, since there is no indication of MS Windows being used. And how exactly would you get a BSOD screenshot unless you were using VMWare or something? Seems rather impossible to me.
What?
I'm curious what/if any Linux document editing programs can display all the Russian characters? It sounds like that is part of the reason for using Windows at least on some of the systems that the Astro/Cosmonauts use for workstations.
What?
Gee, and I was going to speculate that the missing Martian Lander was using Windows.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Windows 2000 BSODs on me whenever I try to run RealPlayer. The latest NVidia drivers for my TNT2 M64 haven't helped.. So much for a solid M$ OS.
I find it quite weird that they operate a space station on a normal consumer point and click OS.
:)
I would have though that with the resources needed to build an orbiting spacestation they'd have enough human resources to either build their own specialised OS, or customize some existing one (perhaps something like QNX).
One can only fear what happens when they upgrade to one of the new microsoft leases based licenses so when their link goes down and they can't contact microsofts license server the entire space station shuts down
Resistance is not futile - www.gnu.org
If it really is a software problem (and not buggy
hardware as in 99% of BSODs) then you can get
W2K to generate a core dump and then analyse it
with the kernel debugger.
Hmmm. The ISS. Man I can't wait to see a Beowolf cluster of these.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
When trying to change my NT Domain password and my Netware 5 NDS password at the same time using the password change function did not BSOD, but simply rebooted the PC without changing the password anywhere.
HP PrecisionScan 3.x and the HP official Win2000 drivers for the HP LaserJet 5/5M Standard printer do not get along. If the printer drivers have been on the PC at ANY TIME, even if they have been removed, running PrecisionScan reboots the PC. In addition, HP's crappy little MacroMedia installer program will reboot the PC when Autorun grabs it. If you skip the MacroMedia crap like anyone who is sick to death of HP's dog-shit quality installers, you can't get the install to complete. It will not accept any install location as valid. Granted, the HP problem has to do with their arrogance any sloppy coding, but Win2000 is supposed to be so incredibly stable, it shouldn't let a minor program like that crash the PC.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Have to stay with Novell for this year. We merged with a company running Applied, and only have a Novell license for Applied.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Perhaps it was a Mir sympathy crash...
Space Stations of the World, Unite!
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
1) The article says nothing about Windows or any other OS.
2) Yes, NASA uses Windows.. they use windows 95 on their laptops aboard the station.... because they have long-standing procedures on how to use these notebooks reliably. When they crash, they know how long it takes to reset them, and just what to do, etc.
But please don't just make it out like Windows fucked up the ISS. That's silly.
Redundancy (or voting) does not necesessarily imply increased stability. For example, if in a voting system, if the majority of systems happen to be installed wrong, then the majority vote could still result in incorrect behavior, such as attempting to turn your plane upside down as you cross the equator. (Actually happened, see the book "Doing Hard Time.")
There's going to be a lot of Windows bashing on this story, but folks, remember we're not talking about the Windows 9x kernel here.
I wouldn't want to trust windows 2000 with my life, but I haven't yet seen a BSOD on it
I think the odd thing is that they have three systems, but they're all the same OS. Usually, these control systems are implemented three different ways, so that whatever bugs are present don't affect all of them.
Windows 2000 would be a much saner choice, IMHO, if backup #1 was linux and backup #2 was another unix.
Man, it is really bizarre to see a press release about an oranization cold booting into safe mode. The way they write it up, you'd think it was rocket science. . .
So go away you idiot.
Apparently a single server is malfunctioning. Problems include not being able to communicate with the Station, command the new robot arm, nor turn off the Station navigation system. The Shuttle also cannot lift the orbit while the Station navigation system is flying the Station.
A NASA page says:
We discussed some of the ISS computers in an April 4 article about ISS logs, although not the C&C computers. Apparently there is a malfunction of the Control & Data Handling C&C MDMs, not merely communications to the PCS C&C laptops. The 6MB PDF NASA ISS overview describes CDH in Section 2.
The PCS C&C laptops run Solaris. The CDH MDMs do not run MS-Windows. This was not a BSOD problem in orbit. (Some other laptops do use MS products, but not these)
Apparently a single server is malfunctioning. Problems include not being able to communicate with the Station, command the new robot arm, nor turn off the Station navigation system. The Shuttle also cannot lift the orbit while the Station navigation system is flying the Station.
A NASA page says:
We discussed some of the ISS computers in an April 4 article about ISS logs, although not the C&C computers. Apparently there is a malfunction of the Control & Data Handling C&C MDMs, not merely communications to the PCS C&C laptops. The 6MB PDF ISS overview describes CDH in Section 2.
Tipsy's Here?
So, it seems, the LAN is using thinnet. Makes sense -- it's shielded.
We should be careful about jumping to conclusions about this being an NT BSOD problem. That usually isn't an all day affair to fix. Now, a bad terminator resistor on thinnet segment or a crimped cable, or a slightly wacky transceiver could cause a tricky to diagnose problem. One of the big wins for 10*BaseT*, aside from using standard phone cable, is that error detection and isolation is much easier in a hub and spoke topology than it is in a bus.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In space, no one can hear you reboot...
Of course, the fact that NASA had just installed a bunch of critical hotfixes from Microsoft's FunLove-infected update site is purely coincidental.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
If I remember well, the logs mentioned Solaris.
exactly.
IANAL, but I play one on
There are other ThinkPads on board with DOS, but those are only for other functions (email, documents, DVD movies, etc). I think there is another laptop or PC that runs windows to do some excel spreadsheets for the control systems, but I have never seen it or read any documentation or even heard anyone mention it except for some posts here on /. Everyone here is also saying (as are all the news sites) that the laptops are 486's, but all the documentation I've read and hardware I've used and been told about have been ThinkPad Pentium 133's and 166's. That may have just been test hardware with the 486's as flight hardware, though.
I wish I had all the 10's of 1000's of pages of documentation I read and have access to at work so that I could confirm all the stuff I've been saying. The thing most people aren't saying is that there are three different systems running: the main computer control system which is a crapload of 386's and custom microchips communicating on a 1553 bus (I don't know what the OS is for this or even if there is an "OS" since each piece of hardware is its own system), the Solaris ThinkPads that are interfacing the main system, and the random computers that do everything else. I personally think all these different machines running different OS's and other software can cause (and may have caused) problems for the station as a whole even though each part may be best suited for its task.
OK, that is pretty much everything I know about the system of control computers on ISS; I will stop postion on this article now.
IANAL, but I play one on
Apparently, the station came back online before having to "rock the casbah." I guess that's good because we didn't have to intentionally break things. It's unfortunate because I love silly, brute force solutions like this.
IANAL, but I play one on
Also, according to that same article, it is sounding more like a software glitch again. Of course, that still doesn't mean it is Microsoft.
IANAL, but I play one on
I have no idea what the arm and stuff is running and how it communicates with everything else.
I think there are also a couple thinkpads that are Windows only, but they are just used for email and reading documents and stuff (nothing mission critical).
IANAL, but I play one on
That is not what happened at all. The IBM thinkpads are just INTERFACES for the control system. They don't actually control things. They just allow the astronauts to see what is going on in the station and sendc ommands. All of the actual control (autonomous and commanded) is done by other machines: three Command and Control Multiplexor/DeMultiplexors (not running windows).
IANAL, but I play one on
In this case, the problem was not with the interface software OR interface computer (thinkpad) but with the core system (they were still not sure whether it was software or hardware last I checked). Not only that, but the software of the Thinkpad was not provided by a "monolith^H^H^H^Hpoly" unless you consider Sun Solaris a monopoly.
I guess I always did think of HAL as an OS and not an interface. That is an interesting revelation to me, but that still doesn't change the fact that the interface didn't cause the problem and the fact that the interface wasn't supplied by a monopoly.
IANAL, but I play one on
What really happened is the US control module computers stopped responding to any inputs from the ground. They weren't able to control the station or tell it to shutdown or anything. Their plan to fix it (last I heard) was to have the Russian control module move and shake the ISS around until the US system thought it was out of control and went into what is called Free Drift Mode. In this mode, it can be completely controlled by the Russian module and we can debug the system and bring it back online.
IANAL, but I play one on
IIRC, the stated reason for using Windows is that astronauts (who are not necessarily computer experts) can manage it. Well, is it worth the risk?
Wouldn't it be better to use whatever system is best for the job, and send a computer guy up there to maintain it?
(Yes, I admit it, I'm only suggesting this because it increases my chances of getting into space from zero to negligible.)
--
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The opperation of the 386 is well known, and studied, any bugs in the chip are well documented and can be programmed around.
And yet these are the same people who chose a Microsoft product as their OS... Scary.
God Fucking Damnit
Big Station, Orbit Decelerating!
----------------------------------
"We're sorry, but the website you're trying to reach has been disconnected."
FROM:
x p1 shepmarfeb.html
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/e
SHIP'S LOG 22 FEB
The day really gets off to a bad start. The server connection to the net is down hard. We worked on it last night until 0100 and could not bring it up. We were doing the file server part of network
reconfiguration yesterday. This moved the FS to the lab-we also extended the Ethernet lan from the
Node into the lab (not part of the procedure). This allowed the server to rejoin the network without delay, rather than waiting much later when the RF access points are set up. The plan was working well, and the server was online from mid afternoon. At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back.
(that really instills confidence in the stability of your network).
So as of 0700, we have to use the OCA machine for daily planning. Fortunately, ground has uplinked
everything to the OCA's directories, so at least we have what we need onboard. But when we try and
print, the printer locks up. It is not happy with the net now either. So Shep and Sergei start trying to figure out what is going on. After trying lots of other computer tricks that don't work, we put another network card in the server and that seems to fix the server problem. We power cycle the printer and that comes back. We are having a hard time understanding the how and why, but everything is working.
There's *nothing* in the CNN article ... implying that Windows is the reason for the server crash
Micro~1.oft spent a lot of time, energy and money to ensure that their OSes were dominant on the ISS. They have spent millions of $$$ just to place a few hundred copies on the ISS, in the space flight centre, and in the russian control centres. The reason for this massive cost was to use the ISS as a giant marketing tool, and they even created a whole marketing campaign around it.
Windoze is not the only OS on the ISS, but it is dominant. There are some *nixes running critical communication processes, such as the main link from the station to ground points, and these have not had many problems at all.
When the M$ servers started crashing, the whole micr~1.oft in space campaign was put on hold. If you read the logs created by the station crew, they are pretty upset having to spend entire days trying to fix micr~1.oft problems. NASA has a direct line into the best and brightest engineers at M$, but even they are clueless as to why certain processes hang, why backups fail to happen, why entire directories are blown away with no trace, or why new patches cause driver conflicts.
Since the Register article highlighting the ISS problems in the logs, micr~1.oft has been putting pressure on NASA to redact all mention of micr~1.oft. Certainly someone has been archiving copies of the logs since they appeared, so they can diff them later and see when NASA bows to micr~1.oft pressure.
As you noticed, none of the mainstream reporting now mentions micr~1.oft by name, that is due to a pressure campaign by one of the largest advertising bugdets in the US. But when the logs are posted for these events, you will notice a great many references to the machines running micr~1.oft, even if the name of OS is redacted out. If you do a little research, you will see these machines are running either DoS or windoze.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
If I *had* to make a choice, I'd choose QNX. AFAIK, it's actually used in certain life support systems in hospitals.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Ok, I'll use your definition of religion if you like. We'll start from the definition that all religions are based on truths. I would then assert that science is not a religion because science is not based on, or even really concerned with, truths. Science is concerned with theories and evidence. All theories and all evidence are always open to question -- infact, they must be testable and repeatable so that they can always be questioned -- so they can not in any sense be considered truths. There is no leap of faith in science because science is not built on faith, it is built on scepticism and pragmatism. We have given up on the idea of absolute truth and proceed with the theories we have because its the best we can do right now, knowing full well that these theories may be discarded later on.
It looks like the AC doesn't want to play anymore, which is a shame considering I'm about to conceed a point. When I stated that *most* religions are based on the acceptance of certain ideas, I qualified the statement because I know of some jewish scholars who define religion as the struggle with the question of god, not the belief or dis-belief in god. So, by their definition of religion, science could be considered a religion if you use it as your means for deciding whether there is a god, the nature of god, etc. But even under this broad definition, science is not a religion when used for something else.
Well, it looks like at least one AC wants to continue the discussion. I don't know if you're the same one, of course, but I'm willing to continue playing. I took a quick look through the site you mentioned, but I did not find any presentation of science as a religion -- a link would be a great help. What I did see on the site was arguments from a religious viewpoint arguing against some of the conclusions of science, but that is not what this discussion was about. We were looking at whether science is a religion, which is a very different question. Of course, since this is all way off topic to begin with, it may be best to continue the debate elsewhere. Any suggestions?
That last definition is so broad as to be useless. Since it can be applied to _any_ activity, it can not be used to distinguish between any two activities. If you chose that last definition for religion in your debate, you reduce your argument to a tautology. You are claiming that science is a religion because all activities can be classified as religions. Not very convincing.
Yes, your sig is flamebait, and I see nothing wrong with that. In this case, it seems to have sparked an actual discussion instead of a flame war.
Moving on, let's examine your last question, because its an interesting one. You start with one observation -- a person prays to be healed and afterwards is healed. In this case you have a single corelation. From a scientific standpoint, I would say this qualifies as evidence, but not very strong evidence. I certainly wouldn't draw a conclusion from it, but if I were a researcher, it might interest me. The theory I would build from this would be "prayer cures this illness," and then I would search for more evidence that supports or refutes the theory. If I'm intellectually honest, I have to consider evidence for or against my hypothesis and not try to twist my observations towards one conclusion or the other -- being only human, this may be difficult, which is where peer review is valuable.
Now its my turn to throw out some flamebait. It is my observation that people who try to somehow "prove" their religious beliefs only except evidence that supports their position and ignore, discount, or do not even concieve as possible, evidence against their position.
Finally, I would take issue with your characterization of science. Science does not have a set of beliefs based on what it assumes to be facts. Science has a set of theories based on observations. This is a much weaker claim that, ironically, has led to what is, in my opinion, a much stronger system.
You are using definitions 3 & 4 given above, not just 4.
Sounds to be to be user related. Windows NT 'put them in the wrong place'. uh huh. Sure it wasn't Tibor?
Out of memory space on the disk. Ah, how about out of disk space period. You fill the root volume on a *nix machine and see what happens.
. Very little to do with Windows and a lot to do ill trained spacemen.
See http://www.spaceflightnow.com/station/stage6a/0104 26fd8/
-M
user error - entering an illegal value in a DB
app error - DB accepting illegal value
OS error - OS crashing because of divide by 0 because of previous errors.
The first is understandable.
The second is unacceptable (should have been caught in test).
The third is unforgivable.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Dude, I was referring to the Yorktown discussion thread. I never said it BSOD'ed. I said crashed. There's a difference.
Here's the article about the Yorktown.
I used to work for a defense contractor, so I know how these things should be tested. You don't just test on good inputs, you test with bad ones. That's why I said that the app crashing was unacceptable. However, nothing should ever cause an OS to crash, especially in a military environment.
It doesn't have to be a BSOD, it could be some other failure mode, which is what appeared to happen to the Yorktown.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
* Shiny new International Space Station: 6 billion dollars.
* Super duper i386's: a couple thou each.
* Shoddy system software on space station: a couple space men (suffocating then burning on re-entry).
* The whole World realizing that Microsoft has changed it's name to "Redacted": PRICELESS!
There are some things money can't buy, for everything else theres Microsoft.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
ISS: Ahhh control the NT CD won't boot. /b to make boot floppies.
Control: Yeah, thats right, that old 386 BIOS does'nt support CDROM booting but damn it's got some rad rad protection!!. Just run winnt
ISS: OK, so how do I get to the CDROM?
Control: Well you boot off the MSDOS boot floppy that has CDROM drivers of course.
ISS: OK, done that... ahh control it started copying over that boot disk and is now complaining that it cannot find command.com and is asking me where to find it. It asked me to label these disks 1 to 3 NT something or other, so I'll boot of this first one...
Control: No ISS, that won't work, it actually copies those floppies 3, 2 and then 1 (boot). Do you have another MSDOS boot floppy with CDROM drivers?
ISS: No, but Igor says he has the "Deb-Ian(?)" boot floppies and that I can "ftp install it from his Notebook?!?!????", he rekons that we can install "Lee? Nooks?", do something to the NT CD, create a FAT partition, copy the i386 dir to it, set it bootable with eff-disk and "sys it" from FreeDOS(?), reboot and then install NT from there????
Control: Stand-by ISS, we have MS support on the line, we have been placed in a queue and will be answered by the first available opperator, she's saying something about us being a valuable customer, just a sec... ummm, you guys would'nt happen to have a Visa or Mastercard handy?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Is there any way to impliment a system whereby we moderate /. editors? Ideally our moderation would effect salary directly. :)
/. has lately.
In all seriousness though, I know that we can change our preferences to ignore articles from certain editors, but perhaps an editor moderation system would increase the quality of headlines and submissions around here. While most publications make headlines inflamatory and eye catching, few blatently lie like
"If NASA engineers built space stations the way Microsoft writes operating systems, the ISS would have been toast long ago..."
There's still many years in it's operational life, lets hope NASA avioded ex-microsoftees like the plague.
I second that, no matter how unpopular this view might be on these boards. I started with NetWare 3.11, right after my graduation. I have gone a long way after that, dealing mainly with HP-UX andSolaris now. I still have to see a server with the stability (in overcoming utilization surges) and uptimes of NetWare 3.1x.
It was actually a bad thing for Novell: almost noone wanted to upgrade!
Sigged!
The station runs on VBScripts running in MTS talking to an Access database. Complex vector analysis computations are done in Excel. Commications with station are via IM and IIS. The station arm talks to the rest of the station via DCOM.
All in all, the computer system is extremely robust, and expected to last for 25 years with only the occassional microsoft patch.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Summary: COM+ and Windows 2000 Server provide an intricate infrastructure for building distributed applications. This article identifies and explains the key technologies and services you'll need to master in order to build large-scale information systems for Windows 2000 Server. (22 printed pages)
Adapted from chapter one of Programming Distributed Applications with COM+ and Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 (2nd edition Microsoft Press ISBN# 1-57231-961-5)
So, one millennium's ended and another's just begun. Just how much impact did the changeover have on your life as a professional developer? Sure, when the clocks all ticked zero, there were a few hiccups here and there. A few outdated systems had to be taken to their final resting place. But our industry as a whole didn't experience the doomsday scenarios predicted in the media. This was especially true for those of us who build applications based on operating systems and development tools created within the last decade. It's pretty humorous when you look back on it all. Rumors of the death of your company's information system were obviously greatly exaggerated.
Then again, does the press really ever know what's going on in our industry? They missed the fact that it was a century bug and not really a millennium bug. The problem was rooted in the use of two-character dates instead of four-character dates. If the human race had had the same technology 100 years earlier, we would have faced all the same issues on New Year's Eve of 1899. However, "millennium bug" sounded so much more sensational and, consequently, sold more newspapers and magazines.
Remember a few years back when the press predicted that everything would be rewritten in Java, including the United States Constitution and the Magna Carta? Now the Java buzz has subsided and we see Java for what it is--a young and promising language with its share of strengths and weaknesses. It didn't take the industry by storm. It's a language that's usable in some situations but unsuitable in others.
Now everybody's talking about XML as the cure-all technology. I know that as XML matures, we'll find more and more uses for it. It will solve lots of problems that are very hard and very real. But XML will never replace technologies such as COM, Corba, and Java, as many people have suggested. It's important that we keep all these new technologies in perspective. It's not healthy to get overly excited about a technology that might solve all your problems a few years down the road when you have to ship an application in the next few months.
Why Should You Use COM+?
I'll assume that you are at least considering using COM+ to build distributed applications. Many companies are using COM+ and Microsoft Windows® 2000 because they provide a robust development platform. This platform is made up of several core technologies that provide the basic building blocks for constructing multitier business applications. And, after all, the more the underlying platform brings to the table, the less code you have to write and debug.
I probably don't need to convince you that multitier applications offer many advantages over the two-tier applications that were in vogue in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Your company has probably already decided to abandon the two-tier approach in favor of a multitier strategy. However, I'd like to take a little time at the beginning of this article to review the most significant problems with two-tier applications and explain how multitier applications provide solutions to many of these problems. I'll also discuss why multitier development introduces some new problems and additional complexities.
One of Microsoft's goals in developing COM+ has been to offer companies the benefits of multitier applications while hiding as much of the inherent complexity as possible. Over the last decade, Microsoft has made many advances in creating this infrastructure for distributed applications.
The first version of COM shipped in 1993. Since that time, COM has grown from a young and complicated technology into the core of Microsoft's multitier strategy. This article examines COM's most important milestones. Along the way, I'll also do my best to define all the acronyms that those marketing folks have generated over the years. You've probably heard of OLE, DCOM, ActiveX®, and MTS. COM+ and DNA are the two most recent additions to the list. But have you ever tried to explain the difference between these terms to someone at a cocktail party? It's not easy, is it? They all mean different things to different people.
The article concludes with a high-level overview of the distributed services that have been integrated into the COM+ platform. Any nontrivial multitier application requires such things as transaction support, integrated security, a Web server, messaging, and delivery of event notifications. This article will identify where each of these COM+ services fits in. This should give you an appreciation for COM+ as a whole and show you the light at the end of the tunnel.
From Two-Tier to Multitier Systems
One of the best reasons to use COM+ is to move a company's information systems from a two-tier architecture to a multitier architecture. This transition requires the design and creation of a middle-tier layer of business objects. Business objects usually sit between client applications and database servers. COM+ serves as the platform for these types of systems.
Two-tier systems have been widely deployed in the industry, so the problems associated with them are well known. Let's review the key shortcomings of a traditional two-tier architecture, such as the one shown in Figure 1.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Then Katz would certainly be the high priest to this council.
The majority of rants . . . er articles on slashdot are often incorrect, biased, pure propaganda, reactionary, immature and half-baked.
A disruption in communications can mean only one thing....invasion.
http://www.naildrivin5.com/davec
Windows? at NASA!? so stupid, i can not believe it!. I bet China will be more succesful, as the now poor russians were.
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Or rather, that's what the latest and greatest "fresh from the horses' mouth" from someone who purports to be an engineer at NASA who wrote The Register.
Of course, knowing the source, you have to take it with an even bigger grain of salt than you would from anyone on here.
Maybe the shuttle was PitBull's test server? Coincidence?
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I've gone to every link and don't see anything that says that the machine involved was running Windows. Was it running Windows or not?
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Check out this short Register story, which has a link to a very high rez photo where you can sorta make out the error messages, especially if you are familiar with the system.
/. article was poorly chosen - no research or fact checking apparently.
Which implies that a laptop, somewhere in the psace station was running some MS OS, but probably has no relevance to the topic of this article. I doubt their mission critical stuff is running on someone's laptop.
the headline for this
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Probably an impossibility... but is it possible to contact Shep regarding a clarification of this?
Not that I believe this at all, but it occured to me and I figure it's amusing enough to share.
"Sorry, Dennis. That darn computer system crashed again, we just can't let ya launch right now. We figure it'll be fixed by... oh... October." <sotto voce: Frank, have you finished the bluescreen plan for Friday yet?>
Aren't you mooks used to this treatment by now?
Edith Keeler Must Die
It is specifically Solaris x86 running on a laptop.
-----
...maybe they were really Really REALLY stupid and got infected with Chernobyl. The articles say the crash happened Wednesday in USA time, but what time zone does the ISS use for its computer clocks?
Plus there's that M$ support site infected with FunLove. Or maybe it was just a hardware failure...
Some one here linked a page at CNN.com and yes the server is NT. And yes it was the server that went down.
This story, also at CNN, (briefly) covers some of the hard/software used on ISS.
thats what you get for buying closed source products. i wonder if a site license for a spacestation is more than for an office...
Any OS can crash, even linux has kernel panics. The only OS that I would be willing to trust on something like the space station would be something custom built for it.= \=\=\
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=\
Try http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/2/18540.html to find out NASAs' rebuttal of that Register story. Seems it's not only /. that froths at the mouth at the thought of bashing IBM and Microsoft.
hc
Coax would have the advantage of plenty of shielding from electromagnetic interference. Otherwise, no advantage.
If you're reading this NASA, here's some advice. Buy some little metal doohickeys for the back of each networked computer. These doohickeys fit around a coax cable, can be screwed into the back of a power supply, and cost about 5 cents. In my experience, using these helps stabilize the cables a lot, and you get more uptime that way.
I am not a lawyer.
In space, no one can hear you reboot...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Never thought of that before. Good point.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
That's a space oddyssey, er, oddity.
And the software in question is provided by a huge monolith^H^H^H^Hpoly...-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
- Can't shoot him
- Can't just release a tiger on him
- Can't drop a 16-ton weight on him, zero gravity and all
So that leaves the perennial question: What about pointed sticks?--
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Set up your main e-mail server to be Sparc Solaris running sun's sendmail, your secondary e-mail server as Alpha Linux running sendmail, and your tertiary e-mail server to be Intel OpenBSD running qmail.
No trivial task for the ISS people, but if they had 3 programming groups working on 3 implementations of the same communications code, but each for 3 different platform/OS's, your redundancy wouldn't be as restricted to software issues.
Going 3 times over budget isn't bad, is it?
-f
-f
www.blackant.net
Nah, it's still a screenshot. It's not a screen dump.
This document describes the Windows NT/95 based Station Support Computer (SCC) system. (see also this site for details on the computer systems and software aboard.)
This page details just some of the problems the crew has had with the SCC and this quote sums it up:
SHIP'S LOG: NARRATIVE OF JOINT OPS 08-09 DEC
...
Carlos trying to load the SSC upgrade for the FPP experiment. No go. He spends about 3 hours on this and finally gets it to load after multiple tries. This very consistent with our earlier SSC experience-and one of the big reasons we try to minimize computer reconfigurations.
While these don't offer any hard evidence that the problem is Windows, having read the station logs, I could certainly understand why /. editors might jump to this conclusion.
MSNBC has reported on problems in MS products before... it's not like it's been reduced to a PR arm for MS. I can't remember the specific instance, but it had to do with Office 2000 (SR-1 and the Win2k problem, maybe?). I'm sure there are others as well.
Don't go assuming that there's no truth in anything they say. Granted, there's a bias there, but it's by no means total.
I really liked this one:
At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure.
I don't think that there is anything I can add that would do it justice.
Politics, Culture, Food?
Hummm, from the BBC article was this quote
"You can rest assured that everybody that knows anything about a computer is now at Johnson Space Center"
Guess that means those of us left reading this must be completely computer illiterate!
Untrained millionaire space tourist - check. Microsoft Windows - check. Next up: flaming alien space bat monkey pilots. Am I the only one hearing a 007[0]-like bad guy laughing somewhere? [0] Are James Bond movies written by the same guy who does Pinky and the Brain?
--
mrBlond
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
Well, looks like some1 at slashdot has just recently upgraded fortune... or maybe f**ed something up in slashcode: Usage: fortune -P [-f] -a [xsz] Q: file [rKe9] -v6[+] file1 ...
cefek
Plain old sigh.
According to CNN,
"The computers were running, but were unable to access data in their memory banks because of the downed server."
Would these be the memory banks that have the spinning thingies against the wall? It does not compute.
Real time software for mission critical systems is written in Ada. That's a no-brainer. If there is any assembler, it's tiny, of severely limited scope, and meticulously tested. In fact, having worked with some very low level networking code for ISS (in Ada), I doubt there's any assembler in there at all.
As to the 386's, they're rad hardened and known reliable. And, unlike the home computer I bought a couple of months ago that's state of the art, whether I need state of the art or not, the jobs these CPUs had to do simply didn't require anything faster than a 386, even given a hefty allowance of spare cycles and memory for future growth.
We bought what we needed (in space, rad hardening is not optional) and we didn't buy what we didn't need. That's not $400 hammers, that's the definition of responsible stewardship of the public's money.
As far as I can see, wouldn't that put the crew into a really hairy position? Without support from the ground, how they'd have no way to know how to try diagnosing / fixing the problem.
Hmm, RTFM perhaps?
I doubt they just get thrust into the station untrained. Training, I'd guess, is fairly complete. They are after all, orbiting a planet at 17,500+ mph in a vacuum. One would think that self reliance is a tad valued.
No sig is worth reading.
It's no secret that NASA isn't too keen on Tito's planned visit to the station. Looks like their choice of Windows will help them out in this regard!
--
It is not particularly scary. Software systems don't benefit from redudancy in the same way that hardware systems do. Most software bugs are systemic (ie, an uncommon code path that just doesn't work). So redudant software systems (even ones that are multiple seperate "clean room" implementations) frequently go down at the same time when in the same operating environment. For more information check out the work of Nancy Levison and the other people in her group.
Maybe there is a reason that the MSnbc article doesn't mention anything about Operating Systems... Have you forgotten what the "MS" in MSNBC stands for? (Here's a hint: Microsoft!) Though the last line of the /. article says: NASA is using Windows for most of their computing functions, as mentioned here.
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
I think they're using 386s because radiation hardened Pentium & Athlons are hard to come by. And you have to remember that the whole thing was designed, what, 15 years ago. BTW, I think I read somewhere that cosmic radiation causes astronauts' laptops to freeze up every couple of hours, and they're used to reseting them every now and then. Anybody knows if this is true?
Hmmmm..... Is somebody here not familiar with the concept of portable code? It can be done, ya know. On the other hand, I think the author's point was that if you have three separately implemented systems with the same functionality, they are not likely to have the same flaws, which makes your redundancy more valuable. Even if you just use one code base and port it, at least the OS of your back-up system is not subject to the same problems as your main system. A back-up is of little value if, as soon as you fail over, it fails due to the same condition that crashed the first one. Since NASA's running on a shoe-string budget (compared to the support they once had) these days, and I imagine that the support from the other nations involved with ISS is not much better, however, I'm not surprised that they didn't go that route.
ONE server went down... the THREE you speak of were clients, which of course are useless because of it.
Mooniacs for iOS and Android
This complete non sequitur is pretty much in line with the BS apologist "science = religion" crowd. I can't believe they keep attempting to teach that in high school. The problem is that the whole point is to question what people tell you (in this case, science). The problem is that they're telling you to question a process that has this introspection built into it, and they aren't allowed to tell you to take a closer look at your faith-based beliefs and question those.
Basing your religion on truth doesn't make it science. ALL religions that I know of take a leap of faith at some point. They use explanations for factual occurences that cannot be tested or proven. Even worse, they will sometimes bend facts around to prove their religious conclusion. This is in direct contradiction with science. If you want to speak in scientific terms, think of it this way: ;-)
- Science starts with a hypothesis, examines evidence, and creates a best possible conclusion based on the evidence. Experiments must be repeatable to be credible.
- Religion starts with a question, gives a conclusion, and then either creates evidence or jams known evidence into the conclusion. Creationism is a good example of this when religion and science conflict. It's astoundingly disgusting how disingenuous creationist leaders are in manipulating laypeople into believing that claptrap. All they do is tell half-truths and lies about existing evidence to convince people of their conclusion. Science should never work like this! (Now, whether people manipulate what is ostensibly science into smoke and mirrors and lies is another issue
A good example of this is when creationists use the second law of thermodynamics as an argument for creationism. Basically the argument is: entropy must always increase, therefore life is impossible without a deity. In fact, planets and any other organization MUST be due to a higher power. Of course, they don't mention that entropy must increase "in a closed system" because that would ruin their entire point. The big old decaying sun is dumping out way more energy than is used on earth to maintain life and complexity. It's sad, but I've even heard creationist professional scientists use this flimsy argument. They should know better.
There are a lot of people who give this "science = religion" nonsense because they're trying to make peace with religious people. Guess what, you don't have to equate the two to believe in one or the other or BOTH. Just stop apologising and confusing people about the whole issue. The comparison is only useful in that people who follow science should be careful not to blindly follow it as if it were a religion -- you've got to question everything you hear/learn, especially with today's media. This really applies to anything, but often students are taught to choke down science without questioning it. I wish that they were taught HOW to question science so that they could easily tell good science from the bad. Instead they usually only get the message that "science is just a religion and you can believe it if you choose to, or not, there's no inherent value to it". Oh well. Then they come to slashdot ;-)
They put this together before M$'s code sharing idea. I wonder how they audited the systems for safety. Anyone got any ideas?
I thought NASA actually went through and proved their code before they sent things up. How can they do that with M$?
Hey guys, let's all bag on Windows while we got a chance, or wait, let's all just grow up here. The MSNBC article says nothing about the OS, it just says a software problem. I'm not the biggest MS fan, but it infuriates me to see everyone on /. get on the bashing-bandwagon everytime an article mentions MS.
-Rick
"Long live Solaris!"
I saw far more NetWare ABENDs than I've saw NT Bluescreens.
Perhaps because Netware had a much bigger installed base than NT throughout the 'early Nineties'?
I see many more NT blue screens nowadays (i.e. five or six a year... I avoid NT where I can...) than NetWare ABENDS (i.e. 0), esseentially because approx. no-one runs NetWare. Doesn't mean it's more stable.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
Also he writes that the computer that crashed were not the laptops:
Ya think it might actually be those massive solar flares we experienced this month, and not necessarily the OS? (naa, that'd be too smart) Or maybe it might actually be software not necessarily the OS? 3 computer systems going down at the same time means there's something more going on than just the OS. And as for backups being other operating systems- now that wouldn't really be a backup now would it? They'd have to write three complete software systems. (You know they use custom software right?)
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
We simply cannot have peoples lives being dependant on software that can crash. In a business context, we can get used to crashes, after all it is only data, and it is only the livelyhood of the bussiness at stake. It is only maybe millions of dollars. In space, it is lives.
Which OS would you be willing to literally bet your life on?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
You use a camera. Check out this short Register story, which has a link to a very high rez photo where you can sorta make out the error messages, especially if you are familiar with the system.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The IBM Thinkpad laptops to which you refer, [are] called PCS (Portable Computer System) [and] are used throughout the station. They are indeed 486 based laptops. However, they are running Sun's Solaris OS for x86, and the OpenWindows WM, and a custom application that provides a graphical interface to the various on-board systems.
It is not unusual for a project of this size and scope to be using technology that seems dated to the man-on-the-street. [...] The PCS runs its own applications, which have very little to do with the actual main function operations in a module. [...] The laptop's processor is not involved in the calculation, monitoring or execution of the station's processes. [...] The computers that crashed (the C&Cs) and the PCS laptops are not the same computers
So usual original assumption was wrong. But that still leaves us with the other question of what *are* they running on the main system.
And the Original question of what you would bet your life on is also still interesting.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
In some respects, I could be, but the generally excepted definition of radiation hardening is to build the electronics with another layout and/or foundry.
I just wanted to point out that the other alternative is sometimes the better path. See what issues you have and then use good engineering to make them non-issues. For many years, the process has been: "Well, we are going to put this into space. Okay, well let's have Lockheed Martin (now BAE NA), or Honeywell or Sandia make a radiation hardened version and we will fly that."
It really is not that difficult to build simple circuits that perform EDAC, measure current levels, and reset units.
The other thing is that a number of times, the result of radiation hardening is not that the device is less susceptible to most SEEs, but merely total dose. That was the case with the ADSP21020 and that is pretty useless in my opinion. You can put some simple shielding around the device (like the SEi (now Maxwell)RadPack(tm), but simpler) and decrease the amount of dose that the device will see in space significantly.
I just want to contradict one point you made: "in space, rad hardening is not optional".
That is incorrect.
Microprocessors (electronics in general also) have a wide variety of radiation response out of the box. For instance, the AMD K6 is known to be pretty bad for single event latch-up and not very usable. On the other hand, the PC603 actually is not to bad right off a commercial foundry line.
With this in mind, there are also a number of ways to mitigate radiation effects, including latch-up protection circuits, EDAC, redundancy, cold sparing, etc. These methods can remove the number of effects that propogate to the subsystem or system level.
Radiation hardening in many instances can also succeed in preventing effects from reaching the system level, but there are a number of penalties to pay. Schedule is often the biggest (as you know, many rad hard processors are very old), cost (this stuff isn't cheap since it is boutique), performance (many rad hard processors can't perform to the speed of their commercial brothers because of layout changes, extra resistance etc.), and also many times the required power and size can be affected.
Now we are presented with two paths: 1) radiation harden a processor, 2) measure the rad effects of a commercial processor and mitigate them with extra circuitry (which has its own extra liabilities in cost, power, size, but typically are much lower).
In some instances, rad hard is the right choice (in human flight missions, it tends to be a good choice, but not always), and in some commercial products with some workarounds are best.
Simplifying the issue to "rad hardening is not optional" is wrong...it is optional, but if you say "radiation effects must be dealt with", then I agree with you.
here
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I realize that, in all liklihood it was a Windows machine, but that doesn't automatically mean it WAS, and it certainly does not justify calling it a BSOD crash.
---
Chief Technician, Helpdesk at the End of the World
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
Just an addendum... according to the article at The Register (posted elsewhere), the fault was possibly due to the actual IBM Thinkpads used... so the implication that it's Windows is even related to this problem is probably wrong.
I'm no fan of Windows... frankly, I use Linux whenever I get the chance. And it's great that Slashdot is evangelical about my favorite OS. But that's no excuse for bad reporting. There's *nothing* in the CNN article (or any of the others, for that matter) implying that Windows is the reason for the server crash. Implying that it is related (with the little tagline "NASA is using Windows for most of their computing functions"... why add this, except to add sensationalism to the article?), is just bad, bad form. If any other publication did this, I'm sure people here would be complaining about poor journalism, bias, etc, etc, et al, ad nauseum. Frankly, I think that little line should be removed, and the post should be allowed to stand on it's own. Please, don't put these little editorial comments into the stories. There's no need. All it does is damage Slashdot's (already shakey) credibility.
One of the code free player sites was claiming that NASA bought a modified code free player from them (so does that mean NASA broke the DMCA?). It might have been CodeFree.com.is
I guess my .sig was flamebait (though it is something I believe), but aren't most people's .sigs flamebait?
My whole point is that science is a religion in that you have a set of beliefs based on what you assume to be facts. If a person is truly religious (not in it for power, greed, etc.), then they belong to a religion that only relies on "facts" they believe.
I've gotten in some heated, um, discussions with a few people of strong faith that are astounded that, as a Christian, I believe in God and science. I believe God created the universe and that science attempts to explain how using observations that can be made using our five senses. These senses can be faulty or deceived and result in bad science (think of any of a number scientific hoaxes that endured for a while before being found out). Miracles are those experiences that don't fit known scientifically describable phenomon. People make up theories to describe the evidence available to them.
How about this: If someone prays about an incurrable desease and is found free of it a their next checkup, what happened? They had a problem, tried to find a solution through medicine, failed, tried another solution (prayer, it worked. What would your conclusion be?
science is a religion
Oh, I don't know. What about the following of Linux? Perl? OS? You could almost say that they have a spiritual leader. OS definately implies a belief that OS will result in a better world. So does following a number of religious faiths. I also seem to see the term "zealot" associated and used by members of the above groups.
science is a religion
Observations can be made by scientists and non scientist alike. What many people say separates religion and science is how those observations are interpreted.
If nothing is done with the knowlege that is gleaned, it is not science or religion - merely entertainment. Both science and religion have ideas about why the observed phenomonon occured and what affects it will in the future.
My intentions were not to put down science nor put down religion. I was trying to point out that from the point of view of either a staunch scientist or religious person, all that they believe is based observations (that they believe they are interpretting correcly) and that the difference between science and a given religion or between any given set of religions is that the interpretation of those observations. Good science or a sound religion will not have holes in their reasoning, or they would not have intelligent followers.
science is a religion
science is a religion
You mean Techtronics at http://www.techtronics.com (an excellent company - they moded my Pioneer DVD for me and it plays all regions nicely).
They've got full details on their site (as you mentioned) at http://www.techtronics.com/uk/shop/510-nasa.html.
--
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
I mean really, people. Sure, we've all had bad M$ experiences, but blame the NASA engineers for a poorly designed redundancy, and let them blame their supplier.
While they're at it, maybe add the fact that the Canadarm2 is the big brother of the Canadarm that each space shuttle has. Maybe that it has 2 "hands", one on each end, that will allow it to "inchworm" its way along the outside of the station. Perhaps mention that Canadian Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian spacewalker (as of this mission) is the one who installed the arm??
You'd think every American news editor has a spark plug up their GI orifice that gives them a shock anytime they allow "Canada" to get into print. Sheesh.
Mr. Ska
I slit a sheet
A sheet I slit
Mr. Ska
... yet 32 years ago, when a decent computer would have been twice as big as the lunar module, 50 times as buggy as Windows (believe it or not) and offer 1/100 the functionality of a modern computer, we made 6 flawless trips to the moon ...
They should have told us that they drove a Chevy or a Ford up there. That would have at least added some creative value to the story.
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$_='hfflbwfsbhfzp vs';s/(^.{4})(.{7 })(.+$)/$3 $2 $1/
would this be news (here) if it had been Linux...or BSD...or XFree that had crashed?
Got friends?
...can mean only one thing: Invasion.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
Well there's a letter from a Nasa engineer up on the register correcting aspects of their story regarding the 'crash'. The Thinkpads in use are 486's and run Solaris x86, however these are not used for mission critical system, they appear to be simply monitoring devices. Interestingly the guy neglected to say what the mission critical systems were running (which were the ones that went belly up)
....but all they found there was a man who repeatedly said that nothing was true, but was later found to be lying.
They use windows laptops. Do a search for "windows" on this text or on some of the other logs Michael linked to.
That is odd. Unless they all started at the same time and suffer from some sort of OS-induced clock bug that crashes them every 49 days...
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
The ISS computers that have been crashing (the MDMs) don't use Windows. The MDMs and other embedded computer systems are based on Intel 386 chips. If they have a kernel, it is probably VxWorks or other commercial RTOS. AFAIK, the only ISS computers that use Windows are some of the laptops, however, some use the Intel version of Solaris.
Why 386 chips? Because they have been tested and been found to be relatively radiation tolerant. More current chips are likely to be subject to more radiation-induced faults due to smaller transistor size.
Some of the laptops on the shuttle certainly do run Windows/NT and we know from the logs that they have NT and Exchange on board.
See my journal, I write things there
here. Why didn't he just post to Slashdot, I wonder? ;)
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
Nope; the machines that crashed were the main ISS CCS systems - not a 'server' in the usual meaning of the word. See the Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/ - for informed comment from a NASA software engineer.
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
As far as I can see, wouldn't that put the crew into a really hairy position? Without support from the ground, how they'd have no way to know how to try diagnosing / fixing the problem. And if they couldn't get it going... well, perhaps they'd all just goof off for a while, like when the boss takes a day off sick ;) ... but wouldn't they have serious problems, say, preparing for the next shuttle or Soyuz docking?
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
The day really gets off to a bad start. The server connection to the net is down hard. We worked on it last night until 0100 and could not bring it up. We were doing the file server part of network reconfiguration yesterday. This moved the FS to the lab-we also extended the Ethernet lan from the Node into the lab (not part of the procedure). This allowed the server to rejoin the network without delay, rather than waiting much later when the RF access points are set up. The plan was working well, and the server was online from mid afternoon. At about 2200, we were reconfiguring some mail files which, with a lot of help from Windows NT, got put in the wrong place during the backup procedure. When we finished restoring the files, the network was down and would not come back up. We worked this for several hours. Finally, jiggling some cables brings just a part of the net back. (that really instills confidence in the stability of your network).
:)
This is so strangely reminiscent of a past job. It's just fascinating to realize that, unlike the place where I ran into these problems, this happened miles and miles above earth, in the vacuum of space. The good thing though...in space nobody can make off with your full set of TechNet CDs
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
... for the 3-finger salute
Every bloody emperor has his hand up history's skirt [Peter Hammill/VdGG]
Control: Microsoft tech support suggests standard recovery procedure: re-format your hard drive and re-install the OS.
ISS: Uh, roger.
Control: And don't forget the service packs...
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www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
Hate being an apologist for anyone, but from the same source:
/ 39 .htm
http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/december14
Quote: (Roger Baker, marketing manager for CAE Electronics Ltd. in Quebec)
"NT played no role in the Yorktown's LAN crash, Baker said."
Whilst the guy is a marketdroid and obviously not to be trusted this rings true. The two navy contractors quoted in the previous article struck me as being zealots.
The article was also critical of the Navy for not testing the app adequately. And btw if your app doesn't handle divide by zero it will (and should) crash on any o/s I've ever worked with.
**Vanuatu or bust**
So the fact that the guy can't boot into Solaris, but can into Windows makes this a Mirkysoft problem? Geez - looks like Sun can save a few support staff then (or give them another week's holiday!
**Vanuatu or bust**
It's not worse
NASA uses old computers because they know how they work (they've had years of experience). When you change to new hardware you also change to new hardware problems (i.e. the pentium floating point bug). It is therefore a lot safer to stick to obsolete (but familiar) stuff than to keep on getting the hottest new hardware all the time
If an experiment works, something has gone wrong.
Found this excerpt from the station logs (the Nov 27th One) "Sergei notices that the Russian PCS laptop has locked up. He tries to reboot, but the Sun application software won't load. Lots of messages on the screen noting data errors. Sergei thinks that it may be the hard drive. He boots up windows to see if the windows partition runs OK--it does. So at least some of the hardware is functional. Troubleshooting starts right away with TsUP. Without this PCS, we don't have a laptop interface to the central post computers." The entire link is: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/crew/exp1/exp1 shepnov.html
Total energy/mass of an object in orbit is 1/2 v^2 - GM(earth)/r; you get a circular orbit when the kinetic energy is equal to half the (negative) potential energy, i.e. v = sqrt(GM(earth)/r). The total energy of an object in an orbit (as opposed to an escape trajectory) is always negative.
--
spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
course they couldn't repeat the task - they couldn't bloody see!
The link that specifically mentions Windows, for those of you wondering, is here.
Now what do you guys make of this?
"Used the startup disk in the onboard software suite, but could not find a particular file while hunting around with DOS. This would have been much easier with some bootable media (CD-ROM?) that could run Windows. (Or if Shep was not indoctrinated by that "other" operating system). We may need an emergency boot capability again. After 5+ attempts, finally got the hard drive to take an image off the ghost CD. One of the Autoloader floppies went down, but SSC 2 is now running normally. ( 3+ hours troubleshooting). "
Guesses? Bets?
WTF....you would think that NASA would have the smarts to install a unix/BSD/Linux system on the space station considering the mission critical nature.
ISS: umm control, we have a problem, the windows box is dumping the air tanks out into space.
Control: well guys you will have to do a hard boot
of the system because it crashed.
ISS: roger, rebooting windows......
Control: what's your status on the reboot.....
Control: hello.....comback ISS.......
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The mod was made outside the US to remain DMCA compliant. Of course the crew only watch DVDs in the Russian part of the station.......
What really sucks is that if this is true then someone forgot the lessons of that USN ship, dead in the water.
As a side note, I was amused to see from the crew logs that even NASA get the same Backup/MS Exchange problems that everybody else seems to get.
One question that popped to mind. Does this count as the most expensive tech-support call in history? I know how much I hate debugging software/hardware issues over the phone but this would be a nightmare.