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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."
They are using Outlook/Exchange like a BBS that sends in digest mode only.
No one cares. Honestly.
Oh Man Oh Man Oh Man, You're still using the command line? You gotta, I say you just gotta teach me that Arcane forgotten art!
Who needs a GUI when you've got the command line!
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.
When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that Mozilla thunbird would not work in zero gravity.
To combat the problem, NASA scientists spent a drunken weekend and $12 billion on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange licensing to develop a mail server that works in zero gravity, upside down, covered in stale beer, and old pizza boxes, and at temperatures ranging from below 10 to 25 degrees Celsius.
The Russians used Mutt.
For all those years i wanted to shoot outlook into outer space, and they already did...
In space, no one can hear you throw a chair.
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!
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?
They have to be very careful in a close environment such as the shuttle or the space station to keep the air healthy. Using mailx like you do would give off too much smug for their filters and cleaners to handle.
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.
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
Thats the beauty of telepathy! You only have to think about security to use it.
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.
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...
You and your command lines, I receive my email as boxes of punched cards!
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
It would be insightful if it were talking about something else.
Using the command line to read email is hardly a 'good' way to go about it.
It works and is usable for some, but even most shell users use 'a gui' like Pine or the like.
Its cute that you think you're bad ass cause you and the parent suggested the command line, but it just shows you're trying too hard to be something you aren't.
There are times to use the command line, and times when it is more efficient. Reading your daily email isn't one of those times, regardless of how cool you think it makes you to do so.
You aren't old school, you're just dumb and inefficient.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Whys that? Because the terminal window on your monitor takes less energy to display? Nope, thats not true without using an LED display (not LED backlight, the entire thing has to be LED or it doesn't make a difference).
You think that just displaying a GUI consumes energy? Please provide a citation. Any GUI on a modern OS doesn't require any processing power for displaying something on the screen that is static. You update the screen to current and it sits there.
Outlook isn't constantly drawing the entire display for each frame of your monitors refresh, the video card is, and it works the exact same way regardless of using the command line or a gui app, especially since you probably would end up using a terminal client on a system running in GUI mode and not traditional text console mode anyway.
Then couple in the additional wasted time from the incredibly niave and out of touch with reality since you have the idea that YOUR mail client is some how more efficient than theres.
Its cute that you have tunnel vision and are a retarded fanboy rather than having any sort of logical thought on the issue.
Good job, you've once again reassured my previous experiences that contrary to popular belief, MIT produces nothing but ignorant douche bags who think they know a lot more than they actually do.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You may jest, but you can do a lot more, more easily, from a command line than a GUI on any platform. Even Windows. Try to
ren antique???.jpg desk???.jpg
in File Manager
In Windows: CTRL+A, F2, "desk", ENTER.
Admittedly that gives you names like "desk (01).jpg" and not "desk01.jpg" but it's close enough. If you want a significantly higher level of control, try something like Flexible Renamer (somewhat prone to crashing, but the most versatile and powerful I've found).
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
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.
aww man I totally would have if he wouldn't have TURNED INTO A DICKBAG AT THE END
Who needs a GUI when you've got the command line!
Me?
I'm sorry, but when something breaks, I fall back to my working computer (with a GUI) with access to Google. :P
You, sir, have obviously never heard of nmh, or its predecessor MH. It's a suite of command line tools for email, and in 20 years of reading email, I've found nothing that yet comes close to the power and capabilities of reading and processing email with nmh. Being able to search for email from multiple folders using regexp and shell scripting just isn't as easy as on any GUI MUA I've ever seen, and because it is just a bunch of single-task binaries, it's very easy to build a GUI or even web-based front-end for it. The only thing that got me to switch from using it as my primary email was the gmail interface, and labels vs. folders. If not for that, i'd still be using it daily, and not cuz of the cool/smug factor, but simply because it works, and works well.
The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. -- John Gilmore
You got that backwards, actually - Outlook isn't tied to Exchange, Exchange is tied to Outlook.
My sig can beat up your sig.
It's called a TUI.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
1. You received the mail with my family pictures. I need the one that has a picture of my house in it. Find it and send it back to me.
2. You receive a ton of new albums in mp3 format, but since your mp3 player is short on space, you need to weed out the "interludes", which are each less than 1 megabyte. Save the songs, but delete the interludes.
3. Take a link from the email, go to that website, and post the albums and pictures to the "cloud" for backup.
Just a few things I'd think would really suck to do with a command line interface.
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.