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Passport Database Outage Leaves Thousands Stranded

Posted by Unknown on from the maintenance-considered-harmful dept.

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."

2 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Replication != Backup by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From their Q&A:

    Q: Why wasn’t there a back-up server?
    Back-up capability and redundancy are built into the system. The upgrade affected our current processing capability, in part because it interfered with the smooth interoperability of redundant nodes.

    We don't need backups, the data is replicated, we're cool.

  2. Re:Change management fail by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Interesting

    simple yes or no questions

    It is only simple because you speak English. You need to widen your cultural perspectives. In other languages, and other cultures, it is not so simple. For instance, Chinese does not even have the words "yes" and "no". If you ask a Chinese speaker if they have a pen, they will answer "have" or "not have". If you ask them if they are going to lunch, they will answer "going" or "not going". There is no such thing as a "yes or no question" in Chinese, and culturally, Chinese are much more direct than Indians or Japanese.