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Dublin Air Traffic Control Brought Down By Faulty NIC

Posted by timothy on from the can-go-wrong-can-go-wrong-nothing-can dept.

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."

4 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. There's only one way to solve this by anomnomnomymous · · Score: 5, Funny

    Put all those NIC's on the terror watchlist!

    --
    When you shoot a mime, do you use a silencer?
  2. Re:testing and QA by tinkertim · · Score: 5, Funny

    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 :)

  3. Re:testing and QA by Hal_Porter · · Score: 5, Funny

    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;
  4. Re:testing and QA by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."