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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.
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.
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.
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I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Ground control to Major Tom, ... ...
your laptop's dead, there's something wrong!
Can you read me, Major Tom?
Can you read me, Major Tom?
Can you
Here, I'm sitting at my laptop
far above the world.
My laptop's screen turned blue,
and there's nothing I can do
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
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.
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
You don't need anything fancy. I was using UUCP to do bulk and batched transfers of email, Usenet feeds and even files back in the early 1990s. It's become obsolete in a lot of cases, because everyone went from low-bandwidth limited connection modems to always-on broadband connections, but back in the day, I got all my email, newsfeed and even the odd file a few times a day via a scheduled UUCP transfers (which also sent any emails and posts I might have). Ah, the good ol' days of bang paths! Still, UUCP has its purposes, and it strikes me that it is a well-established protocol designed just for this sort of environment.
It just goes to show you how much damage has been done to tech by Microsoft, and this pervasive psychological need to use its shitty software, its shitty file formats and its shitty protocols, even with an organization populated by people who should be intimately familiar with Unix and its own much more rigorous and time-tested protocols. I mean, this is nothing more than FTPing mbox files back and forth, which, twenty years ago, would have had anybody with a moderate knowledge of mail systems and communications protocols rolling on the floor laughing.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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?!
BEAT THAT!
All the same, but with UPS instead of FedEx.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.