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Debugging The Spirit Rover
icebike writes "eeTimes has a story on how the Mars Rover was essentially reprogrammed from millions of miles away. 'How do you diagnose an embedded system that has rendered itself unobservable? That was the riddle a Jet Propulsion Laboratory team had to solve when the Mars rover Spirit capped a successful landing on the Martian surface with a sequence of stunning images and then, darkness.' The outcome strikes me as an extremely Lucky Hack, and the rover could have just as likely been lost forever. Are there lessons here that we can use here on the third rock for recovery of our messed up machines which we manage from afar via ssh?"
Are there lessons here that we can use here on the third rock for recovery of our messed up machines which we manage from afar via ssh?
As a former co-worker (hi, jwalker!) used to say when people tried to draw ridiculous analogies, "It's exactly like that...only different."
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
I dont think i want to learn too much from this as the solution was the equivalent of rm -rf... On a side note i wonder when the 40 min ssh delay jokes will begin again
drunk chemists
at least it wasn't a blue screen?
man rover?
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
I don't get it, couldn't NASA afford the on-site warranty?
Wow, I didn't expect the rover had 128MiB of RAM, or 256MiB of flash. Funny to think they had to run chkdsk from so far away :)
I hope they use SSH or something .. who's to say a future mission ..some hax0r doesnt grab control of a space probe and have it send goatse.cx pics back??
.. after all the probe communicates using known frequencies. There may be probs picking up the return signal without an expensive antenna i suppose. But then again maybe some hax0r can build one cheaply and or do what captin midnight did ( www.signaltonoise.net/library/captmidn.htm ).
All it takes is a transmitter out in the middle of nowhere africa or some island
I wouldnt worry about signal jamming though as that will probably be discovered easily.
The Martians are pissed that the repair labor was outsourced to Earth.
Table-ized A.I.
In other news stories, the Microsoft Corporation decided to sue NASA, apparently since the right to crash systems was only theirs. Not to be left behind, SCO insisted that the code that caused the failure was unethically copied from their source repositories. This has indeed caused a flutter in the space communities
Sounds like NASA forgot to empty the rover's recycle bin. =)
Steal This Sig
I routinely reboot and reprogram machines in our data-center that is 2000 miles away from me.
As long as all hardware components are working and there is connectivity to the machine, it doesn't matter whether the machine is a few miles away or a million miles away.
You are too humble, friend. What you do routinely and without thinking, is nothing less than a miracle of modern science. A miracle that you take part in every day. And because of men like you, we don't have to rely on the abacus anymore. We sent a pentium to the Moon, and soon, Mars will be colonized by G5s. America salutes you, for all the things that you do.....
Like a rock! I was strong as I could be be!
Ooooooohh! Like a rock!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Yeah, that was HAL's excuse too.
Seriously, hats off to all the JPL programmers. Proving to the Martians that there is indeed intelligent life on Earth, very intelligent.
My pet peeve when I'm doing remote troubleshooting is 'ifconfig eth0 down'...oops. At least NASA is smarter than that.
Peter.
You know what I hate? Wait, what do you like? I hate that!
The only real bug was the inability of the system to properly handle running out of file entries (or more specifically, consuming too much RAM as the number of file entries increased). However the software should have never have stressed the filesystem to that degree in the first place.
When you can write an embedded operating system that can gracefully and automatically recover from every possible thing that might ever go wrong, perhaps you should send your resume to NASA.
NO CARRIER
Operating System not found. Press any key to continue.
Damn! Left the floppy in!
That must have been some feat to get the arm on the rover to press Ctrl, Alt and Delete at the same time!
Today we salute YOU, Mr. Super Wizard Windows Reinstaller.
Only YOU can fully appreciate the difficulty of running a format c: command, while swilling a room temperature can of Red Bull.
"Hey this stuff is hard now!"
While NASA is too preoccupied with things like farway rovers, you take your vocational tech school fueled arrogance directly to the place where it will make the absolute least possible impact: A Slashdot discussion thread.
"Loggin' on now!"
Your unique eye for obviousness allows you to sling turds of obtuseness every which way, and then brag about how you were RIGHT as soon as one of your pronouncements hit true - regardless of how many times you were wrong before.
"See I told you sooooooo!!"
And if some idiot rocket scientist has the unmitigated gall to not bow down to your obvious Geniusdom, you unleash your fury down upon him with all the tenacity and mercilessness of a rabid pit bull with a tender buttock locked in its jaws.
"Total anonymity!"
So keep clicking away, oh Marauder of the Mousepad. Because when the results you so desire finally come about years from now, you can say it was because YOU demanded it."
"How come they haven't fired that dumbass head of NASA yet yet?"
(Bud Light Beer, Anheuser Busch, St. Louis Missouri.)