| Wednesday, September 22, 2004 |
01:50 - We have the way DOWN
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2275
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Someone please explain to me why Microsoft ought to be "trusted" to handle any sensitive computer-controlled functions on this entire freaking planet.
A major breakdown in Southern California's air traffic control system last week was partly due to a "design anomaly" in the way Microsoft Windows servers were integrated into the system, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times.
The radio system shutdown, which lasted more than three hours, left 800 planes in the air without contact to air traffic control, and led to at least five cases where planes came too close to one another, according to comments by the Federal Aviation Administration reported in the LA Times and The New York Times. Air traffic controllers were reduced to using personal mobile phones to pass on warnings to controllers at other facilities, and watched close calls without being able to alert pilots, according to the LA Times report.
The failure was ultimately down to a combination of human error and a design glitch in the Windows servers brought in over the past three years to replace the radio system's original Unix servers, according to the FAA.
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said. Backup systems failed because of a software failure, according to a report in The New York Times.
The 49.7-day µsec rollover problem, then. The problem that was originally seen in Windows 95. The problem that is apparently still around in Windows 2000 Advanced Server. The problem that caused four near misses and put 800 commercial flights in jeopardy over Los Angeles.
One of these days, the people in the trenches in charge of covering up for Microsoft's incompetence will have trained themselves to "trust" the company so much that they won't be able to recover at all when one of them forgets to run whatever periodic stopgap kludge script they've worked up, and many people will die. On that day I want to see some of these people who have stumped for Microsoft in the big-iron fail-safe infrastructural sector to answer a few pointed questions.
UPDATE: Here's another shining example of Microsoft's robustness ethic.
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Brian Tiemann
