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Dublin Air Traffic Control Brought Down By Faulty NIC
Not so very long ago after passengers were left hanging by a similar glitch at LAX, Gilby4mPuck writes with another story of NIC failure leading to a disruption of air traffic, this time in Ireland, excerpting: "Data showing the location, height and speed of approaching planes disappeared from screens for 10 minutes each time. ...
Thales ATM stated that in 10 similar air traffic control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported. ...
'[They] confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy,' said an IAA spokeswoman."
Put all those NIC's on the terror watchlist!
When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
Whatever happened to testing of installed hardware? You'd think they might csider that sort of thing important when it involves the lives of thousands of people. Then again, maybe they were drunk at the time.
Well, when we set up some cheap NAS boxes with redundant nics .. some load balancers and other goodies .. we tested it by yanking cables on the bonded nics and making sure everything still worked.
This was for an e-commerce site.. I would agree in hoping more testing with real failures would be done on systems that monitor air traffic.
Also, we were very drunk when yanking cables during our test .. so I don't think intoxication is really a factor. In fact, turning a drunken monkey loose in a data center with a clearance to pull cables is _very_ good fail over testing :)
if this piece of hardware was capable of "overc[oming] the built-in system redundancy", perhaps its ilk ought to be patrolling the transistorized wunderplatz of interconnected morsels governing our most hubris means of transportation? I, for one, would certainly feel safer.
We now have confirmed reports from an informed Orange County minister that Ethel is still an active communist.
Only The Spice confers prescience.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
"...an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy"
But it's one of the lucky ones.
Every year, thousands of NICs fall victim to built-in system redundancy; if you know a card whose activity indicators are darkened and lifeless, it may have a redundancy problem. With your support and donations, we at Ethernetics Anonymous can help more network cards beat the scourge of built-in system redundancy, and make them feel like a useful part of society again.
Blank until
I was due to fly the evening it all went wrong. Here's a lesson: if you're standing in a three-hour queue for the Ryanair desk, and they tell people to rebook on the web, and you take out a laptop and 3G modem, be prepared for a stampede.
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29644?page=2&ts=
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
Any number raised to the power 0 is 1. So if you don't install anything, hence n is 0, it will always work since the probability of failure is 1-1 = 0.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I am flying to Florida tomorrow, it will only be my fifth plane flight in total and my first transatlantic flight. Despite being a rational scientist, who knows how safe it is statistically, I am having trouble suppressing my anxiety.
And at this point, fate sees fit to bombard me with horror stories about flying. This news about air traffic control comes on the heels of a headline I just saw on the front page of the Independent about pilots not reporting faults on aircraft and thus unsafe ones still flying about. I can't remember the exact wording because my brain parsed it as "TOMORROW YOU WILL DIE IN FLAMES"
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Everyone in Ireland knows that the Irish Examiner used to be the Cork examiner - and they never miss an opportunity to point out how Dublin is doing a bad job.
This is because Cork thinks that it's the centre of the friggin' universe. The 'Real Capital', my arse! Just a bunch of thunderin' ejits, living in their little Blarney fantasy land. Sure they can't even talk right. What the hell is a 'langer', anyway. They wouldn't even know how to spell NIC.
The fact that they are right is quite beside the point.
(For a North American cultural equivalent, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Park:_Bigger%2C_Longer_%26_Uncut)
Anyone who mods me down is from Cork - believe it!
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
What is a "contol" and why is this so important?
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
So if you don't install anything, hence n is 0, it will always work since the probability of failure is 1-1 = 0.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say that it would never fail. ;)
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Yeah. Fortunately I just got back from going outside. OTOH, it was just raining, and I saw all the millions and millions of tiny water drops falling from the sky. Which made me think of Interrupt 80 and all those forked off-processes it would spawn with that code...
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Lucky Charms never pissed me off so much as Trix did. I remember one commercial where the rabbit actually *bought his own cereal* and the kids took it because "trix are for kids". I wanted to see him mow the little fuckers down for home invasion or something...
Silly rabbit, supersonic lead is for thieving, speciesist little pricks.
So putting in a faulty NIC card and seeing what happened wouldn't have done anything at all, huh?
You keep a bunch of 'faulty' NICs around?
Bullish Machine Tzar