One Failed NIC Strands 20,000 At LAX

The card in question experienced a partial failure that started about 12:50 p.m. Saturday, said Jennifer Connors, a chief in the office of field operations for the Customs and Border Protection agency. As data overloaded the system, a domino effect occurred with other computer network cards, eventually causing a total system failure. A spokeswoman for the airports agency said airport and customs officials are discussing how to handle a similar incident should it occur in the future.

Comments

Re:That's all it takes

[KillerCow]

I am not a networks guy... but it's my understanding that a switch acts like a hub when it sees a TO: MAC address that it doesn't know what port it's on. They learn the switching structure of a network by watching the FROM fields on the datagrams. When the switch powers up, it behaves exactly like a hub and just watches/learns what MAC addresses are on which ports and builds a switching table. If it starts getting garbage packets, it will look at the TO field and say "I don't know what port this should go out on, so I have to send it on all of them." So garbage packets would overwhelm a network even if it was switched.

It would take a router to stop this from happening. I don't think that there are many networks that use routers for internal partitioning. Even then, that entire network behind that router would be flooded.

Re:That's all it takes

[Kadin2048]

Would you think that LAX is running anything that out-of-date or crappy? I assume that they're running everything with spit, duct tape, wishful thinking, ancient custom software, near-fossilized hardware, and Excel spreadsheets ... just like pretty much everything else in the public sector.

I've seen what's running some government agencies, and it's frightening.

The scope of the problem

[WheelDweller]

I agree, but the scope of the problem is much larger.

Americans are still designing systems (and I'm talking WHOLE systems, not just the computers) for the industrial revolution. Much the same way, we're educating our kids for the same purpose- to make them cogs for manufacturing.

The Japanese have a more 'cellular' structure, as opposed to the 'pyramid' designed back a couple of 'turns of the century' ago. One man on top drives five, who drive 200, who drive them all. But the Japanese model is more like object orientation: each unit has private parts. So long as the command it's given produces the proper results and stays within budget, who cares?

Assembly lines gather at their meetings and decide policy on their own. "Fred has been late 3 times this week; do we care?" and the only people to whom it matters, decide. There's no need for a strict, top-down policy, especially since only tiny organizations all do only one job.

Imagine the broken structures in a holding company; they own a newspaper, a carwash and a grocery store; the top man can't say "We'll only use glass containers", because that would be a disaster in a car wash. They can't say "we choose leaded inks" which might be fine for the car wash, but danger at the newspaper. Each unit has it's own purpose.

So how about giving the network admins the power to do *whatever* it takes to let them keep the equipment up to date? As long as it runs, under budget, and doesn't get'em on the newspapers, who cares about the specifics? Why not let the unused budget from every year sit in an account (not being taken back) and use THAT to improve infrastructure?

If these guys were able to have that kind of control, this discussion wouldn't be happening.