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

[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

[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.

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.