EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in mysterious outage

Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by wolrah on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:33AM (#20441183)

> Not trying to be funny here, but I would not be surprised if an automated Windows update borked something.

If someone is running even important tasks that must not be interrupted, much less critical infrastructure like this, on consumer versions of Windows they're absolute idiots and should never be trusted with those sorts of decisions again.

If one insists on using Windows for uninterruptible tasks they should be using a server edition.

That said I'd always recommend

> Recently heard about an Antarctic base that lost heating for 36 hears after a Windows Update triggered a several GB download over the base's modem downlink.

That seems implausible, or at least to have been miscommunicated. The download and install phases are separate, so nothing would have gone down until the download completed. If the heating system required constant communication and went down due to not enough bandwidth being left over that's obviously a very poor design in general, especially in Antarctica. Even if that were somehow the case, it wouldn't take 36 hours for their network team to block/throttle the update traffic to let it work again.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by organsnyder on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:09AM (#20441522)

> If one insists on using Windows for uninterruptible tasks they should be using a server edition.

The server edition can also be configured to perform automatic updates.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by hnarn on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:46AM (#20441913)

The relevant point is whether it's set to do so automatically by default (as the consumer version is). Any operating system can be configured to automatically update, but many of them do not.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by ch4ch4 on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:37AM (#20441833)

Right, but unlike consumer versions, Windows Server doesn't make it mandatory.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by Someone1234 on Monday July 15, 2019 @11:59AM (#20442034)

Enterprise editions don't either. Why are people using consumer grade Windows for enterprise tasks?

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by wrkronmiller on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:24AM (#20440541)

Can you provide a link to that Antarctic incident? I'm curious how a network outage would affect a system as critical as heating...

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by Uplink on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:07AM (#20440941)

The closest thing I can find to this story on Google is this: https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26019-what-to-do-when...

It doesn't involve Windows as far as I can tell - they don't say what the cause of the problem was.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by donarb on Monday July 15, 2019 @12:23PM (#20442306)

This press release from the British Antarctic Survey says about that incident that a coolant leak caused the generator to overheat and shutdown.

https://www.bas.ac.uk/media-post/update-power-down-at-britis...

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by eightysixfour on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:25AM (#20440550)

The heater required an active internet connection and available bandwidth?

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by Fordec on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:25AM (#20441099)

It was actually just a gaming PC with a Nvidia GTX480 belonging to a scientist perpetually left turned on

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by pizzapill on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:27AM (#20441126)

Those NVIDIA fanboys. I have a AMD RX 480 which heats my room just as good.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by privong on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:31AM (#20440603)

> The heater required an active internet connection and available bandwidth?

My guess is that the heater was being run by the machine that required the update and the update download process meant the machine was not available for usual operation. But I don't really know.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by eightysixfour on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:34AM (#20440631)

Windows downloads the updates separately from installing them. Good guess though.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by huhtenberg on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:37AM (#20440660)

... unless it needs to do a quick follow-up update after applying one of the pre-downloaded ones. And then not three reboots later you get your machine back.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by martin_a on Monday July 15, 2019 @09:56AM (#20440840)

Sounds like a pretty normal device to me in the times of IoT...

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by adminu on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:09AM (#20440959)

"hears" is actually a great mixture of hours and years, that leaves you wondering ;) I hope he ment hours, though

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by Someone1234 on Monday July 15, 2019 @12:02PM (#20442063)

> Recently heard about an Antarctic base that lost heating for 36 hears after a Windows Update triggered a several GB download over the base's modem downlink.

I've been researching this. There was an outage. It wasn't caused by Windows. What is your source for this claim?

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by retSava on Monday July 15, 2019 @12:05PM (#20442096)

Curious and not refuting - what was the cause of the outage?

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by Someone1234 on Monday July 15, 2019 @12:10PM (#20442165)

Assuming they're talking about the 2014 outage at Halley Research Station:

> Halley lost power on 30 July after the station’s generators overheated and shut down after a large coolant leak from the main arterial pipe in the station’s heating system.

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/research-on-ice-at-briti...

I cannot find any other Antarctic outages.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by shareIdeas on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:13AM (#20440979)

Are there windows operating systems in the satalites?

The only thing those satalites need to do is, accept signal, do math, and transmit signal.

I don't see why you would use Windows for this.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by Sanzig on Monday July 15, 2019 @10:26AM (#20441108)

The satellites themselves are most likely running some sort of proprietary or semi-proprietary RTOS for their C&DH computer (eg: VxWorks, QNX, Integrity, RTEMS...).

However, it's more than likely that there's a bunch of Windows machines on the ground segment side of the operation, since a lot of satellite fleet management software is Windows based.

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by CannisterFlux on Monday July 15, 2019 @01:20PM (#20443003)

Nah. The ground control segment software runs a version of the ESA's SCOS 2000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCOS_2000 and is on Linux (and maybe Solaris).

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Re:EU's GPS satellites have been down for four days in myste... by shareIdeas on Monday July 15, 2019 @12:13PM (#20442205)

Do you need a windows os to send a signal to the satalites?

No.

But for some reason the op implied windows was to blame without evidence.

I mentioned the implausibly of it.

Op is misleading people.

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