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BSOD Issues On Deepwater Horizon
ctdownunder passes along this excerpt from a NY Times article about a rig worker's testimony concerning the April 20 accident at the Deepwater Horizon well:
"The emergency alarm on the Deepwater Horizon was not fully activated on the day the oil rig caught fire and exploded, triggering the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a rig worker on Friday told a government panel investigating the accident. ... On Friday, Mr. Williams added several new details about the equipment on the vessel, testifying that another Transocean official turned a critical system for removing dangerous gas from the drilling shack to 'bypass mode.' When he questioned that decision, Mr. Williams said, he was reprimanded. ... Problems existed from the beginning of drilling the well, Mr. Williams said. For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death.' 'It would just turn blue,' he said. 'You’d have no data coming through.' Replacement hardware had been ordered but not yet installed by the time of the disaster, he said."
The article doesn't mention whether it was specifically a Windows BSOD, or just an error screen that happened to be blue.
For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death. 'It would just turn blue,' he said.
So they didn't have proper computer administration in place? If my own computer started BSOD'ing often and for months, I would do something about it. I would especially do something about it if it was an important system, irrelevant to if it was Windows, Linux or any other OS.
It's not like it BSOD'd once and caused it. It was BSOD'ing for months.
A Blue Screen of Death by a computer yields a Black Screen of Death on an ocean. Interesting. Kill all humans, anyone?
There's a spot in User Info for World of Warcraft account names? Really?
What color did it turn when the rig exploded?
For example, they KNEW that the BOP (blowout preventer) was not functioning correctly. one of the 2 control systems was out, and they had been bringing up pieces of the rubber seal in the test fluid. They were cutting corners on their cut corners. You'd think this would serve as exhibit A to silence all the "GOVERNMENT R BAD, CORPORATIONS R GOOD" nutcases in the USA today, but unfortunately it does not seem to have had that effect.
Didn't Java's license agreement used to have a clause saying you wouldn't use it in air traffic control systems or medical devices or stuff like that? I'm not saying this is a Java issue, just using it as an example. Safety control systems, especially those where life and limb, as well as massive amounts of money, are at steak aren't the places to be cutting corners and using commodity products rather than purpose-built and well-tested systems.
There are faulty engineering and management decisions every step of the way when producing this well. This is not the first disaster for BP that ended in the loss of life. The question is why is there not criminal prosecutions for bad engineering that leads to the loss of life? Why is it that only people with guns who kill people get criminal prosecutions?
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I mean, the whole rig's cost is in the hundreds of millions (Wiki says $560 mil but google link said $350 mil). The whole disaster is in the tens of billions, ain't it?
You'd think they would do anything and spare no cost to keep the fucking thing in working order and floating.
Makes the $500,000 a day lease look like pennies.
Cutting corners is the corporate way. I have seen so much "Mickey Mouse" stuff at places I've worked it disgusts me. Untrained workers, electrical boxes in pools of water, large pumps at refineries held in place by 4 bolts rather than the six bolts which were intended to be used etc. But of course, none of these problems are the CEO (or board members) of BP's fault. They only take credit when things go right. Avoiding responsibility is the name of the game.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
If it turns out these crashes are Windows blue screens, the media will jump all over Microsoft. But considering everything else we're heard about this poorly run oil rig, it just as easily could have been poor third party/custom software or faulty hardware causing kernel panic, and have nothing to do with MSFT.
Dateline -- Louisana. Several millions of barrels of saliva from FS/OSS zealots on Slashdot fouled the gulf today when they thought maybe, just Mayyybe, Microsoft might have somehow, have tenuously been connected to the previous oil spill. A foul stench of stale beer and tacos was reported along miles of beaches in Alabama, and was headed for Florida this evening.
In other words, sheesh! How speculative and sensationalist can a headline get?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
this is COPYPASTAAAA
Given that the entire disaster seems to have been the result of cost and corner cutting on a massive scale, it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't bother to buy hardware on the Windows HCL, or if they were using cheap hardware with unsigned drivers.
you'd be an idiot not to use anything but a real-time operating system (RTOS). If they use a windows, mac, or linux box for this, then they're idiots and should be held liable. Chances are it's a PLC though, especially for industrial work.
Nobody is bashing Windows so far, yet it seems to be what the editor look for when he wrote the headline. Has Windows improved enough that nobody try to make fun of it anymore, or slashdotters are already older and more mature?
Got Pike?
the regulations don't matter in this case. i'm glad you admit we need some regulations, but the real issue here is regulator==regulated
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/22/AR2010072205133.html?hpid=topnews
the lobbyists, the interior officials, the corporate assholes: all the same people
all the same smoochy same golf hole playing same bar attending backslapping crowd of assholes
that's why we had the disaster in the gulf
you can pass all the regulations you want, it doesn't matter if the ones who are supposed to be policing the industry ARE the industry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I was watching the testimony and he stated that it was a Windows NT system and was constantly giving a BSOD. They had replaced and reimaged the HDD over and over but it still kept happening. There were new servers, workstations, etc standing by and waiting to be installed, but another problem creeped in. They were waiting for another ship to figure out a way to run the old software on the new machines. Once that other ship could get it working and document it, they would then do the replacement on their end. I'm guessing it was a Windows NT 4 workstation.
For months, the computer system had been locking up, producing what the crew deemed the 'blue screen of death.'
Of course now we have the black sea of death. :-(
Black Sheen Of Death?
A company we hired nearly destroyed the Gulf of Mexico... What's that got to do with us?
One our business partners was rating these bonds as AAA when they were worthless, and we were busy making billions passing the bonds off as good investments... What's that got to do with us?
The company we hired to dispose of this toxic waste is just dumping it in a river... What's that got to do with us?
In effect, modern capitalism is a system of mafia thugs and their hired patsies who operate technically within the law, as long as they hire an agent to do their dirty work to take the fall. Any of the real costs can be passed off to the public, either though bailouts or just ruining the commons.
I may have learned something. I always thought that Microsoft products generally were designed to wreck the human mind. Now it seems their software may have ruined the Gulf of Mexico and destroyed the economy of five states.
From the cup is half full kind of view that may mean that one Microsoft driven incident can wreak more havoc than a nuclear bomb.
So BP is not to blame! it was MICROSOFT!
WINDOWS NT was what was running. He didn't state which version, but he stated it was very obsolete, so I'm guess 4 or earlier.
He also stated that they had ordered replacement hard drives and replacement servers.
You can always spend a bit more and make something a little safer. At some point you need to draw the line.
This isn't like they didn't spend extra money on 360 degree airbags for a car and parachutes in case it falls off a cliff. This is like they found out that the brakes were working intermittently and decided to do nothing about it. And when one of their employees questioned them, they told them to keep quiet.
In the past, this was called negligence. I think today it's called business.
Linux running a Windows BSOD screen saver.
It gets in the way of CEO bonuses. Who cares about a few birds or shrimp fishermen anyway?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Must have been an empty catch around the OilWell.Plug() method.
What did we learn kids? Always catch and log your errors. Notification emails are a good thing.
The regulators were tasked to check that the companies followed the procedures for checking their own operations.
This, incidentally, is exactly how SoX compliance functions. And what makes it entirely worthless.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
we don't need nuclear industry regulation, we can just sue the nuclear industry into oblivion after they chernobylize a couple hundred thousand acres for 100,000 years!
we don't need food and drug industry regulation, we can just sue a food or drug industry into oblivion after a couple hundred kids die of tainted food or drugs!
we don't need school regulation, we can just sue the schools into oblivion after our kids wind up being abused idiots!
feel me yet?
the price of no regulation is the destruction of things that cannot be made up monetarily after the fact. you can't put a price on everything, especially something like the goddamn gulf of mexico. there's only one gulf of mexico, friend. put a price on the destruction of that ecosystem and tourist industry. its more than you can get in a courtroom, even from the oil industry, and some of it, like unique species, is priceless. no court case after the fact will bring some things back
furthermore, wouldn't it be better and cheaper for the companies themselves to spend the $20 million to comply with regulations rather than $20 billion to clean up a large oceanic body?
that's why we have regulations. in fact, bad regulations, and shoddy regulators, are still better than no regulations or regulators at all. you have to set standards, or standards WILL be broken. and some of the damage that can be done CANNOT be fixed monetarily with a lawsuit after the fact
we need to CLEAN UP government. we need regulations. we need taxes to pay for regulators and a functioning strong central government. meanwhile, DESTROYING government, which so many tea party and libertarian morons are so intent on doing, is clearly, CLEARLY, much, much worse. think HAITI, retards: that's the end result of libertarian and tea party ideology, whether you idiots realize it or not
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
its the concept of "limited liability"
start making executives/owners personally responsible and things will change
if you thought you could lose everything (your house etc) including jail time because of the decisions your employees made you would take steps to prevent it.
as it stands now people like Tony and his band of wall street merry men can walk away with more cash than beyond your wildest dreams they risk nothing personally, and are guaranteed to walk away rich men either way with no personal consequences. who cares if it goes wrong if you made enough in 1 year to live the next 50 in luxury
if somebody ruined my livelyhood and suffered nothing, i would damm make sure that they and their families didnt wake up the next day.
maybe im old fashioned, but thats just me.
This doesn't sound like a Windows BSOD at all. I'm not sure what DCS (distributed control system) they were using, but in my experience with Foxboro I/A is that when things turn blue it mean's there's no data coming in. The term I usually hear is "Smurfed" because somebody thought the color (cyan) looked like a Smurf.
This would possibly be due to an analog input signal that fell out of the 4-20mA range, or a loss of communications within the DCS or from an outside controller.
Please name the product. If what you say is true, it should be at least possible to raise knowledge about this shame in the general public.
VMWare likely does not work well with custom IO boards / inputs.
Sounds like the airlines wait for people to die before safety fixes are made.
they did not pay for new hardware so just reboot and bypass any lockouts.
its a libertarian utopia
every abuse by government you decry, does not happen in haiti. instead, those same abuses, and a hundred thousand worse abuses, happen on every street corner, by thugs and mafia instead
fact, whether you realize it or not: make government small, and a power vacuum will exist that will be filled by entities that are not accountable to you. being not accountable to you, there is no recourse when they abuse you. that really is the truth. someday you will wake up and realize and stop working so damn hard to destroy this country
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Had they access to the source code to the shit they where actually running perhaps they would have upgraded the OS long ago. Most of us have encountered crap like this, oh the company that sold it to us went under 10 yrs ago so we cannot upgrade, make it keep working.
Got Code?
if we were using nuclear power
It was literally the blue screen of death
The real answer is to stop regarding corporations as 'persons' and go back to regarding them as what they are, associations, and ones which can be disbanded when they screw up big time.
BP stands for BRITISH Petroleum. Just because the US calls them "persons" doesn't mean the rest of the world does.
An HP project manager I know had worked with the staff on Deep Water that didn't make it. Any idea if the report mentioned HP in any of this?
analog video hardware any Guru's?
I've worked on the computer systems that many of these rigs run and they are generally done using one of the following Operating Systems:
Solaris 9/10 SPARC
Windows 2003
None of them, at least none of the ones made by Seimens, Honeywell, Invensys, or Emerson run on Linux, BSD, or any other OS. The Solaris versions are being phased out in favor of Windows derivatives because developers for them and support/training personnel are cheaper to come by than those who can write code for or comprehend the workings of *NIX systems.
It is, in all honesty, a bit scary to think there are a growing number of both Power Plants (Gas, Coal, Oil, Hydro, and Wind) and Offshore Oil Rigs that run entire solutions based around Microsoft Windows platforms. While these companies state in their marketing that they offer full redundancy, options to run 2 or more "backup" stations, and even 5 x 9's SLA, both design control automation and system controls solutions are quite flawed.
The main issue here is that many of these companies offer products that have nearly no competition from others in the market. Each company has their strengths and weaknesses that a majority of the customers know about, so it's not a matter of bidding against competition so much as it is about "How quickly can you get it done and can you do it for this price?"
I hope that something good comes out of this for that Industry, they have been needing a shot in the foot for quite some time over it.
that the system was a dos program (or some old visual basic interface perhaps) running on top of a win9x image? Those things could turn "BSOD" if it got overloaded in any way what so ever, not just from a system critical error (driver failure and so on) seen on the NT lineage.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
If it was any version of Windows, the EULA specifically states
Ask Me About... The 80's!
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
WE. THE. PEOPLE.
your government is not an alien entity come to rape your daughters, lay egg cases in your cranial cavity, or turn you into a duracell battery. your government is YOU
YOU can hold it accountable by VOTING
if your fellow citizens DON'T WANT these programs you dislike, they vote out the guys who put it in, and the programs GO AWAY
but if your fellow citizens WANT these programs and consider it sensible, then the program stay, and you as the MINORITY VOICE have no right to exert your MINORITY opinion over hte MAJORITY
and then your job is to SHUT UP and ACCEPT what the DEMOCRACY HAS SAID
because the alternative is WORSE: the opinion of the few foisted on the majority. your opinion is in the MINORITY, so YOU LOSE. then maybe you should examine why your philosophy is WRONG: police work is more than just cops cracking skulls on street corners. it is also REGULATING OUR FINANCIAL INDUSTRY. REGULATING OUR ENERGY INDUSTRY: POLICE WORK. that you WANT to pay for, for without this "bureaucracy" you get oil spills every month
CLEAN UP your government, don't REDUCE IT. then all the abuses you hate come back a hundred fold
that's the truth motherfucker
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But corporates are all about short term profits. Fuck the future!
Nothing else could explain their rapacious, irreversible, indefensible despoliation of our air, sea, freshwater (and in USA), forests,, environment, health, food, and economies.
you had me at #!
Its been so long since I bought any M$ product that I have no idea what their license says now but at one point wasn't there a prohibition against using their alleged OS for safety critical ( in the formal sense [ HRI, etc ] ) applications like oh say nuclear and aircraft control systems?
When i helped build the bingo1 and bingo2 for Oceanrig (about 10 years ago), the mud system was controlled by a windows pc. maybe after commissioning that went to another system, but not while i was there...
Huge system multiple mud pumps, each with 3 500hp 3ph ac drives. Enough on-board storage tank capacity to unload a tanker full of mud. on board mixing systems, etc...
system designed and built by procon.
I always assumed that during commissioning that head end system control would be folded over to other types of computers, butt who knows now in retrospect... those rigs were not finished in the U.S. due to the bankruptcy of the yard (Friede-Goldman of Pascagoula, ms).
The control system had a bunch of great PLC based cabintes and fiber optic lines in the middle. But at the top, I thought there should have been dedicated computing hardware developed.
I was just an electrical helper back then. I am not an engineer or even an electrician anymore. But as a technically sophisticated person, I think there could have been better head end control technology. Something akin to avionics. dedicated hardware/os/software. Rigorous testing regulations.
These rigs are almost the size of an aircraft carrier, and are supposed to be the most sophisticated ever built?????
Most of the deepwater MODU's are about the same in design and specification.
FYI: Mud control is one of the critical systems when drilling.
That'll last as long as a vendor caught with its pants down is looking for somebody to sue to unload their legal liability on.
That would be BP and Transocean as plaintiffs whoever supplied the 'defective by definition' Windows kit on the receiving end.
Given the EULA content, M$ might be a plaintiff given what this is doing for Microsoft's "good name", if not, I'm sure they'll be able to supply expert witnesses.
Sue one vendor into oblivion over using Windows and we might see a rush to the exits by SCADA and medical vendors in favor of *nix... while I agree with the Apple non-fans, I'd feel a hell of a lot safer if a nearby nuclear reactor was controlled via OSX UI than anything that ever came out of Redmond.
While I am dubious as to the suitability of Windows for desktops, speaking as an ex-user posting from a Kubuntu box, with respect to the non-suitability of Windows in applications where failures can get lots of people killed, I stand firmly in Microsoft's corner.
Tech Public Policy stuff
...repeatedly, as with
Alaska Airlines Flight 261.
It's when things are not running smoothly that the proper operation of a monitoring and control system is critically important, as the 11 people who died on Deepwater Horizon would tell you if they were still alive to do so.
Tech Public Policy stuff