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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.
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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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
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
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?>
It is specifically Solaris x86 running on a laptop.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
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?