Passport Database Outage Leaves Thousands Stranded

linuxwrangler (582055) writes Job interviews missed, work and wedding plans disrupted, children unable to fly home with their adoptive parents. All this disruption is due to a outage involving the passport and visa processing database at the U.S. State Department. The problems have been ongoing since July 19 and the best estimate for repair is "soon." The system "crashed shortly after maintenance."

Comments

Change management fail

[dave562]

Rollback plan? What is that?

Re:Change management fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like your IT has been outsourced to India, who as a culture, literally does not know how to say "no". The answer is always "yes" or some other affirmative that makes you think they have it under control and can do the work. When the fact is, the work they just said "yes" to, they don't actually have a clue how to perform it, so they learn as they go, on your production servers. They don't know what development / test environments are.

Re:Change management fail

[ruir]

Outgoing employees are a flaw THEIR lack of management and a flaw of their processes, and I would not even accept to hear such (lame) excuse. And if there are no savings, I would bring the IT back, at least you can make them accountable and control the process better. I have worked with Indian people in the past, or rather had competing businesses employing them, and was not really that impressed with their technical abilities. And then, it probably does not help most of those firms tend to work on the cheap. Low salaries policy dont attract the best and the brightest.

Re:Change management fail

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.

Do I care?

Re:Change management fail

[pla]

It takes two to fail to communicate. You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.

Sorry, what part of paying you to do a job requires me to give a shit about whether or not your failed third-world culture doesn't like answering direct fucking questions?

"Rude" does not apply. Breach of contract, however, does. I just wish more companies would catch on to this before they decide to outsource, rather than paying extra for literally nothing more than a built-in scapegoat for any and all problems.

Re:Change management fail

[ShanghaiBill]

Sorry, what part of paying you to do a job requires me to give a shit about whether or not your failed third-world culture doesn't like answering direct fucking questions?

The part about you paying them far less than you would pay someone culturally compatible. If you want to pay peanuts, you need to deal with the cultural consequences. I have dealt with Indians for years, and have learned how to ask questions so that I get the answer I am looking for. It is not that hard.

Re:Change management fail

[khchung]

Sounds like your IT has been outsourced to India, who as a culture, literally does not know how to say "no".

On the other hand, I have encountered plenty of managers who literally do not know how to take "no" as an answer.

Takes two to make a pair.

Re:Change management fail

[Anonymous Coward]

You should not be asking questions that require a direct "yes or no" answer. In many cultures, that is considered rude.

Do I care?

If affects your ability to do your job, you should.

Re:Change management fail

[JustOK]

Why? Are you a liar?

Re:Change management fail

[ruir]

Well, it also affects my ability to do the job people lying to me or choosing to reply with half truths to save face. My culture considers that extremely rude too. The rules of engagement have to change in a multicultural world, and if I am the customer, their obligation to bend somewhat their culture is a ball on their side. Or I may take my business and wallet elsewhere.

Re:Change management fail

[Jesrad]

Sounds like your IT has been outsourced to India

Not necessarily. I've seen this exact kind of madness happen just as easily with locals, here in France. Like that time the local, on-site support team from our vendor rebooted the production server instead of the test platform, because woops wrong terminal window in the foreground.

Or when they covertly rolled out a "shame-bug fix" remotely on the production platform during a week-end night, again instead of targetting the test platform, then noticed their mistake, and wiped-out months of production data by reverting to a long-expired backup.

Or when the local datacenter people managed to botch our fully-automatized install+deploy+configure solution by messing up on the one thing they had to do right - that is, upload it and launch it on the correct machine of the cluster.

Don't think hiring local people for more money protects you from such cringe-worthy nonsense. The moment you outsource anything, and I do mean *anything*, no matter how far and how expensive and what nationality: if you base your expectations on anything but an actual track-record of reliability and dependability, you're exposing yourself to long hours of hair-pulling and yelling into phones.

Not just the passports

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole US customs and immigration system is massively dysfunctional. Last year I flew into Minneapolis from Asia. I'd been traveling for twenty hours straight and then I got to stand in line for a full hour waiting for an immigration agent to spend ten seconds looking at my passport photo to make sure it matched my face. Even the third world airports I've been through aren't that bad. There were even empty stations without agents. How much would it have cost to add a few more agents - $100? At the time they were doing this ridiculous upgrade to the airport that must have cost millions - they were setting up all these silly little tables with ipads in the waiting areas. But somehow they couldn't manage to have enough immigration agents. It made me wonder if people in the state of Minnesota are as silly as their ariport - they did elect Michelle Bachmann to congress - so there may be quite a few of them who were dropped on their heads as babies or something.

Large Databases?

[TechyImmigrant]

The article tries to wow us with the hugeness of the database, like this is a reason for the issues.

Yet the numbers quoted are not that big. Any modern PC isn't going to get too upset handling 75 million things. A real data center is going to sit there wondering what to do with the remaining 500TB of storage.

I don't doubt that there is some horrible flaw in the way the system was conceived that rendered it fragile, but whatever it is, it's nothing to do with the enormity of the problem, because it isn't very enormous.