Slashdot Mirror
Using Outlook From Orbit
Pigskin-Referee writes with this excerpt from Office Watch: "On the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station they use Microsoft Outlook 2003, but not quite in the same way that us earthbound Earthlings do. The space shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth right now and the crew exchange emails with the ground a few times each day. Bandwidth is a constraint and you don't want the busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages so NASA has a special system in place. The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods."
how can I fix it?
First exchange! oh wait...
I bet it would down on their power usage if, instead of that fancy GUI, they just used mailx from the command line like I do.
Pah! In soviet spacestation we constrain bandwidth!
This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
They are using Outlook/Exchange like a BBS that sends in digest mode only.
In space, no one can hear you scream at Microsoft Outlook...
Why not just run a normal mailserver with a simple script to deliver any messages in the files uploaded? No need for the astronauts to mess with weird outlook files, just hit "check mail" on whatever client they prefer.
For all those years i wanted to shoot outlook into outer space, and they already did...
...not quite realtime or important?
Yeah, I wonder what kind of IM they are using, if any (I know there were some sessions with Packet Radio and its "IM" functionality, though I'm not sure if that counts)
PS. Thinkpads aren't ordinary laptops! ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Is it actually cheaper to upload all the e-mails in a burst instead of using a webmail system where only the mail the receiver wants to receive would be opened? Wouldn't work if they want to read offline I guess but the concern mentioned is bandwidth not connectivity.
Any mail experts comment?
Just knowing Windows is running in space kind of gives me the willies.
It's too bad the article didn't address the architecture behind all this. I would be curious to hear what kind of network they use, and what sort of relays (satellite?). If it is satellites, why is the bandwidth so low? (Hmmm... maybe they really should have made that ethernet cable just a little longer after all...)
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
mail server on the ground, mail server on the shuttle.
The mail queues up and you open up the connection between them certain times of day. Queue empties.
GZIP the link and your gold.
I am a Martian prince from the Splugorthian region of the Xylerom. I have inherited a bountiful estate worth 1.8345E8 drow'xlian that I must hide from the ruthless Prxyzzilic crime family. I am willing to share 20% of my fortune with you will allow me to deposit fund in your account. Please send me your account information if you wish to do business. Live long and prosper! Prince Ryzzriwz
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Why not just run a normal mailserver with a simple script to deliver any messages in the files uploaded? No need for the astronauts to mess with weird outlook files, just hit "check mail" on whatever client they prefer.
This story hurts me in so many ways. Ow, stupidity... ow Microsoft... ow Twitter...
I can get this is the middle of futt buck Kansas but they can't get it on the freaking ISS? Maybe someone shoudl call DirecTV and ask them to send some installers up and mount a few dishes on the damn thing.... Even if you you had to put a tracking dish on the thing it is doable and would provide a nicer link to the ISS plus DirecTV could use it for all sorts of Free bragging rights for their commercials,.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
UUCP worked quite nicely in the days when links were ephemeral, slow, or generally unreliable. This seems like a lot of effort to solve a problem that existed 30 years ago, solved, and even adapted for RFC821 and its successors. There's a reason that Sendmail knows how to rewrite addresses!
-Scott Hutton
...to use Microsoft software.
Because there’s limited bandwidth up to the shuttle it’s important to keep the OST fairly small so occasionally you’ll hear NASA controllers ask the crew to clean out their Outlook files
They ask them, over a realtime voice connection, to clean out their Outlook files to save bandwidth. That's like sending "You've got mail" as a WAV file after transmitting a 1kB mail file.
So, once a day they bundle a bunch of emails into a single .OST file and upload it to the shuttle. The astronauts then open that .OST file in their local copy of Outlook. And they have to shut down Outlook while the upload is in progress because of Outlook file locking.
If a 'Loss of Signal' can interrupt a POP session, wouldn't it also interrupt a file upload? Couldn't they just POP into the server on Earth once a day to grab their emails to be stored in a simple mbox or some such? Wouldn't this also eliminate the file locking issue as mboxes and Maildirs are pretty old and stable solutions that don't have this problem? This just sounds like someone wanted to use Microsoft Outlook no matter what and hacked together a procedure to use it even though there are way better approaches. And isn't the whole point of Outlook that it has a built in calendar and meeting request system and network folders? They're not even using those more advanced parts of it, they just need email.
We always knew Comcast was corrupt, here's the proof: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1909890&cid=34545432
Do they have something to automatically change that every 30 seconds?
Isn't this how e-mail worked only 20 years ago? I remember only getting mail two times a day at my university for a year or two because that was the only time the mail server dialed upstream and exchanged mail. Congratulations to NASA for reinventing old technology. Next up, if only there were some kind of small device that would let you add two numbers together and give you the answer.....
'The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host...Because there's limited bandwidth up to the shuttle it's important to keep the OST fairly small so occasionally you'll hear NASA controllers ask the crew to clean out their Outlook files'
I say we take off and re-install the entire OS from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
It's the only way to be sure.
CB radio?
As there is a new President in the Office and he doesn't really like (it seems) fantasy and unrealistic plans, he should also order his IT guys to start an investigation why standard, documented protocols like IMAP, XMPP aren't used. A visit from a Internet2 academic could be enough...
In fact, it is an International issue. ISS doesn't "belong" to USA, there are several billions of dollars of other countries out there.
While on it, they should also ask NASA about why on Earth "NASA TV is best viewed fullscreen with Windows Media Player", why there isn't a standard MP4 based live broadcast, why it defaults to Windows Media regardless of your setup...
Something really happening over there, trust me on that... These are the guys who had a genius idea of using Kermit as a protocol for communication before these "Outlook", "Windows Media Player" guys took over the job.
If there are people thinking "Oh but MS is an American company", let me remind, Red Hat, Sun Micro, IBM and lots of standards bodies are American too... That is in case the multi hundred billion dollar project should be a billboard for pathetic software setups.
cewcec
If only that headline used "Nuking" instead of "Using" Outlook from Orbit.
My company recently switched from a really screwball lotus notes install to msexchange and thereby screwed every unix and mac user -- which is to say, 95% of the technical staff. Some of that I can't blame MSFT for, we do have some real chimpanzees on our email team, but the experience does have me shaking my fist in Redmond's direction even more than usual of late.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I noticed you pushed a button on your console. Are you trying to steer your spacecraft? Please wait whilst Clippy ShuttleBuddy extensions for .NET 3.0 SP6 is installed, then after a reboot we'll get right on with that.
"...but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods."
I bet they link to the server using WIFI...
Privacy is terrorism.
Windows exists above the cloud!
In fact, you should be surprised that Windows is _STILL_ running after a Virus has hit the ISS orbiting the planet.
No kidding, Google it.
It is particularly sad that NASA IT guys aren't obviously that pathetic to license Outlook from MS. Something really going on there, a lot of open source software/operating systems has NASA contributed excellent code in them.
PS: I remember they also had Norton Utilities with "rescue diskettes" back in 1990s, it leaked while I was trying to find a way to manually uninstall norton...
Doesn't the use of Microsoft products in space violate article 3 section 47 paragraph 3 of the Shadow Proclamation?
I was doing this 20 years ago with UUCP and/or sendmail.
HELO mx1.ground.nasa.gov
EXTN
QUIT
Push queued mail on demand to the orbiting mail server. Cron up the EXTN trigger or setup sendmail (which its happy to do) to handle the queuing whever you want.
Guess what, it works with exchange too!
I guess NASA spends its money on aeronautical engineers and not computer system admins. I'd be willing to bet that I could do it cheaper and more reliably even with exchange than there method, in their constraints of bandwidth and available connection time.
Seriously, I ran a FIDOnet hub, its not hard. :)
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
From: Oleg Kotov
To: CC Ops Ground Control
Subject: Check out what the toothpaste does in zero-G!
Location: COLBERT Room
Start Time: 2009-01-13 1745
End Time: 2009-01-13 1800
[Accept] [Decline] [Decline with comment] [Delegate]
In other words, it's a really shitty reimplementation of UUCP mail transiting.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
In Soviet space station, bandwith constrains YOU!
(was that the first "in soviet russia" joke that was actually factally correct?)
Free Martian Whores!
IM? They don't. Unlike the massive amount of retards that IM all sorts of shit, this are intelligent people who probably just use the old tried and true method of calling them up on the radio or yelling down the hall if its onboard.
IMs - Email for those who don't realize nothing they do is so important that someone else has to know/answer RIGHT NOW!@%!@%!@%!@%@#^@#^!
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
These OST files are tiny by ground-based standards – around at most 4MB for shuttle crew.
Amazing. A just over a half-dozen people and yet they manage to keep their email communications down to just 2,000 pages of text a day! How do they manage.
The OST file, now with outgoing emails, is copied back to NASA on the ground where the messages are sent, copied to the Sent Items folder and any new email is placed in the OST ready for the next upload.
Well, that makes sense. They reply with the same type of file that they receive with. If it's good for bandwidth one way, it's good for bandwidth the other I'd guess.
Because there’s limited bandwidth up to the shuttle it’s important to keep the OST fairly small so occasionally you’ll hear NASA controllers ask the crew to clean out their Outlook files (the OST).
Whajah? They're sending the *entire* mailbox both ways and just bouncing the same messages back and forth every time? How does that save bandwidth? How do these guys send pictures to each other, zip up an image of the entire hard drive?
I guess that explains why they need to transfer 2,000+ pages of text every day.
This sounds cumbersome and messy
True. Because it is cumbersome and messy.
it’s certainly not the way you’d do it here on the Green Hills of Earth.
It's also not the way I'd do it in space either, because of the bandwidth constraints.
However it makes sense
No it doesn't. Not under any circumstance does "send the whole thing back and forth every time" make sense if the thing you're trying to conserve is bandwidth.
You might also hear ‘CapCom’ asking the crew to shut down their copies of Outlook so that an OST transfer can occur. Outlook puts a file lock on any PST/OST file which prevents any copying (a problem anyone trying to do an Outlook backup might be familiar with).
Ahh, so that's it. They're not trying to conserve bandwidth. They're trying to conserve "thinking about it." Otherwise, they'd only have to shut down outlook when renaming "file.ost.xfer" to "c:\...\outlookdir\file.ost"
In addition, communication with the ground isn’t always possible (you’ll hear warnings of LOS – Loss of Signal during mission communications) so standard methods of email transfer like POP/SMTP, IMAP etc might not be reliable.
True. Why does it need to be email, though. Why can't they just send a psk-31 HF radiogram? or the even more fault tolerant HF packet radio? You only need a transmit station somewhere in the same hemisphere for that to work.
Hell, with a directional antenna (and a doppler-compensating transmitter), there's no reason why they couldn't use 3G cell service when over a country which has it. 300 miles up gets you a window of up to 11 minutes which would let you download quite a bit.
But I don't think bandwidth is really the issue. There's enough bandwidth to transmit live video for pete's sake, but email is somehow a problem? The issue is that "outlook is email." It clearly has simply never occurred to anyone in the chain that there might even be any other way to handle email-type communications.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I use a 2400 modem to call google voice and record the e-mail. Then my computer uses dragon to transcribe them back to digital, then print. I use fed-ex (Hey, not too many donkeys around anymore ya know?) to send them to my mail box. I retreive them from the mailbox by walking up hill in the snow both ways! (but replies go back to the mail box on a belt system).
BEAT THAT!
**note above challenge was tongue in cheek, nothing was real, and if you so much as are reading this post today, you've already won.**
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
When skimming my RSS feed, I'd have sworn the headline had said, "Nuking Outlook From Orbit". Maybe my subconscious was imagining a one-upsmanship over "Will it Blend" to "Will it Nuke".
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Wasn't that what Larry Wall was doing at the JPL when he invented Perl?
Glad to hear they have an Exchange server running the heavy load of emails. I imagine they really need it to schedule all those meetings on their calendars with each other. We all know have disconnected people can get when they never see each other face to face while working on the Space Shuttle. You constantly got people on either the upper or lower level, but you can never find them when you want them.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
IMs - Email for those who don't realize nothing they do is so important that someone else has to know/answer RIGHT NOW!@%!@%!@%!@%@#^@#^!
I'm sure you could find being more wrong very hard.
IM is, on the one hand, quite instant in delivery, like voice. But, and here's where you are phenomenally wrong, it doesn't need immediate attention. It will be there when you feel like answering. Or not answering - because it's for things that aren't so important or so complex as the ones discussed in e-mails. Just one quick short message.
Luckily I'm dealing with intelligent people who mostly communicate with me via IM/sms, because they know that a) voice communication is only for extremely urgent or important things (and as usual method of communication for very few of people close to me) or b) know that mail is mostly for important ones.
Anyway, the main reason I'm asking is that one ubershitty IM network from my place ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadu-Gadu ) claims they were the first in space / on the ISS. While that is doubtful in itself (whether Roscosmos or NASA would allow this kind of software, whether it would connect), finding direct earlier example would be useful (and other than text communication via pocket radio)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Outlook on Earth.
Fuck the Evildoers.
Yours In Perm,
K. Trout
Where most here see only sheer stupidity, what this really is is an astute solution to a very real problem: tight-ass goverments who have no dime to spare for research!
Twitter?
http://ihatehate.wordpress.com
the title gives new meaning to the term 'space junk'
need another system administrator. Cuz the ones they have suck...stupidest solution ever.
> Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods.
Because of [M$ POSS], they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods.
There, FTFY.
Lets see they were using tech from 1948 in 1969 so that means.....yup 1978 sounds about right. Pretty soon they are going to put a microwave in the shuttle too. {insert microwave space joke here}
I read that as "busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages from NASA"
Instead of flaky Outlook/Exchange setups, they should use technology designed for low bandwidth and intermittent connections, like uucp.
Actually the command is ETRN.
Back in the mid-90's, we used to use this with our ISDN customers who wanted to have their own email domains, but didn't want to pay for always-on ISDN. So we set up mail servers for them that would bring up the ISDN link, issue an ETRN command to our mail server, wait while the mail got sent, then shut the link back down. Worked great.
From TFA: It’s surprising that Microsoft hasn’t made more noise about the use of Microsoft Office in space
Microsoft probably isn't making more noise about this because it is a TERRIBLE system.
or... just because it's not the worst, it doesn't make it the best. /. page !
My god - now NASA controls the fortunes at the foot of the
Nullius in verba
I'm not an Exchange admin by any means, but I can think of an easier way using Exchange.
Set up Exchange clients to connect to a specific IP address.
On the ground, let the "spam team" deal with clearing out the mailboxes of spam.
Once complete, disable the IP address that connects to the world, and enable the IP address that connects to space. Let the space people do their thing, then when the spam team does their thing again, shut down the space link, open up the earth link, and let the queued messages flow in.
Rinse and repeat.
This allows minimal data transfer, as only changes are being synchronized, not the whole mailbox. It also allows the boxes to be screened.
...where NASA blows it's financing. On Microsoft "can't bother to fix it" software. How trite. Instead of using free software, free OS's - developed for the scientifically minded, they're using brainless, costly, ineffective software products coupled with brainless, costly, ineffective operating systems. WAY TO GO NASA! Now it's clear why other "space related" groups are moving ahead in the game. Now the old joke makes sense, in a big way. "In the 60's, the US government and NASA spent millions of dollars to research and develop an ink pen that would function in a weightless environment. Meanwhile, the Russians used a pencil."
YankDownUnder Veni, Vidi, volo in domum redire
This story looks like a Microsoft troll. The link to the story http://news.office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?articleid=1329&zoneid=12 does not provide any link to NASA as a source. Without a source we must suspect a hoax. Sending a 4MB OST file to space back and forth sounds incredible, bandwidth wasteful, as information as text would be very large at 4KB per transmission. 4MB could be 2000 pages of text.! I have exchanged emails from the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a yacht using SSB radio and a Pactor modem http://www.scs-ptc.com/shop/categories/modems-en at 2400bps. Why, because bandwidth over a HF radio link is limited. There are many lightweight email clients and command line equivalent email clients that can communicate without the noise associated with animated smileys and gifs. The message is important, straight ASCII, tells it all. The medium here is not the message.
http://www.allbyer.com/ Hi,Dear Ladies and Gentlemen,Here are the most popular, most stylish and avant-garde shoes,handbags,Tshirts, jacket,Tracksuit w ect...NIKE SHOX,JORDAN SHOES 1-24,AF,DUNK,SB,PUMA ,R4,NZ,OZ,T1-TL3) $35HANDBGAS(COACH,L V, DG, ED HARDY) $35TSHIRTS (POLO ,ED HARDY, LACOSTE) $16
thanks... For details, please consult http://www.allbyer.com/
The summary isn't clear about this, but the quoted article is from mid-November. Atlantis is not currently orbiting--she's in processing for STS-132.
I often look nostalgically back and think of the old bang paths for e-mail. Boy, I don't miss 'em! :)
My iPod Touch probably gets a hell of a lot more email than 4MB per day and deals with tricky issues such as Loss Of Signal. Talk about a solution looking for a problem.
TCP over meteorites?
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
What do you mean it's the only way to be sure?
In all probability this would be a most effective means of attracting Borg cubes.
I mean, what does it say if Linux is too complicated even for rocket scientists to use?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Agreed, rsync would be more efficient. No need to move messages to local storage.
We've all learned about the OSI model.
It seems like these guys are going through great lengths to hack the application layer, when this is really the fault of the transmission layer.
Why not come up with a better protocol than TCP/IP or the radio protocol or whatever the heck it is that they're using, and then tune the OS to work off that stack and hand it over to Outlook as standard network data?
-David
Open the OST file in Outlook, HAL.
I'm sorry, Dave, the file is already in use. What are you doing Dave? Dave, let's talk about this.
Daisy... daisy...
If the objective is to save bandwidth...whatever happened to pine/elm/mutt/emacs ?! :D