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."

Comments

There's only one way to solve this

[anomnomnomymous]

Put all those NIC's on the terror watchlist!

Re:testing and QA

[tinkertim]

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 :)

Re:testing and QA

[Hal_Porter]

Only The Spice confers prescience.

It's a success story.

[Farmer Tim]

"...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.

Re:testing and QA

[Hognoxious]

if we add n redunndant fail-overs, the total system will fail with probability 1-p^n

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.

Why!?

[damburger]

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"