NERC Releases Interim Report on Aug 14th Blackout

will writes "The North American Electric Reliability Council has released four documents concerning the August 14th power outage power outage in the North East. The blackout investigation homepage lists all NERC's documents relating to this event. Press coverage is at The Washington Post, CNN, and CBS News. The take home message: FirstEnergy did it. The are, of course, denying it." The report is also available at reports.energy.gov. Reader stinkydog writes "According to Yahoo News part of the blame for the big fizzle of 2003 lies with a failing SCADA system, GE's XA/21 power management system. 'Not only did the software that controls audible and visual alarms stop working at 2:14 p.m. EDT, but about a half hour later, two servers supporting the emergency system failed, too.' According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."

Comments

Go get 'em!

[grub]

"According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."

Good, let's sue SCO!


ps: f1st pr05t

Re:Go get 'em!

[tekspot]

"According to the product specs, it is a Unix system with X Windows."

The reason they use X is because their systems are managed by MCSEs.

Microsoft sucks

[Meor]

[Slashdot]
You shouldn't use MS products for such a critical system.

What? It was a unix system?

Must have been a hardware failure then.
[/slashdot]

You got it in reverse

[just fiddling around]

FYI, US governement have been engaged in a nice deregulation wave for 10 years. That deregulation has been poorly tought out, because of a "The Market Cures All" mindset. What did the deregulation bring? Gigantic power outages and California-style power crunches.

The deregulated US power grid is overstressed, has little or no margin for extra demand, and has outdated and poorly maintained emergency systems. And thanks to Enron and friends, artificial scarceness has been created to crank up prices.

In a nutshell, you pay more and get less(safety, avaliability, quality) than when the market was regulated. Ain't The Market grand?

Electric power is a basic necessity(in our post-industrial world), and should be managed by the state, just like water works and law enforcement.

SCADA Definition

[pjkundert]

For those of you that might be interested, SCADA is an acronym for

Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition

It defines nothing about whether or not COM, DCOM, OPC (Ole for Process Control), or any other proprietary communication framework is used (contrary to some other highly moderated statements you are likely to see in this discussion)

The bulk of serious SCADA systems in place are probably legacy systems of some kind, including many variants of UNIX systems (we have old micro VAX systems still in use). Many of the newer systems are Windows based, and are obviously subject the standard Windows viri, worms, etc.

Worse yet, these systems are very difficult to upgrade or patch, due to the critical nature of their duties. It is not unlikely that a large portion of the Windows based SCADA systems in the world remain unpatched, and are "safely" firewalled off from the internet.

Of course, the problem is that much of the monitoring gear used to diagnose network issues is also Windows based, and carries with it the standard retinue of Windows viruses and worms, right into the heart of the control center.

These UNIX systems have run (and will contiue to run) uninterrupted for years at a time. We have calendar alerts in place to tell us to go manually reboot unix machines after months of uptime, just to ensure that their SCSI drives will spin back up (in case of a control center power outage, etc.)

Somehow, I don't think that is an issue for some vendor's SCADA systems based on more popular OS's, but I might be wrong...