[ale] Windows crashes L.A. Airport

Jonathan Rickman jdr at xcorps.net
Wed Sep 22 11:16:59 EDT 2004


> So after 49.7 days the EAX resets to zero. Most of the 
> Drivers use this Time Service to keep track of the Time out 
> of various services they provide. So after
> 49.7 days the drives cannot use the get_System_Time function 
> of VMM and they crash.

Well clearly this could have been avoided, as I am sitting at a Windows XP
workstation that routinely runs for over 100 days without problems. I have a
Windows 2000 server that is currently showing 64 days uptime, and 4 Windows
2003 servers that are all at 53. Of course, there's a Linux box in the same
room that will probably be up for at least the remainder of this calendar
year, barring any power failures or catastrophic event...but that's beside
the point. The point here is that shoddy coding caused this problem, and it
wasn't code coming out of Redmond. I find it disturbing that the FAA uses
Windows for critical functions, but I find it downright alarming that they
have no better sense than to leave crappy software like this in place. This
system should have never made it out of the testing phase and into
production. 

--
Jonathan "resist temptation to bash MS and be fair, people" Rickman



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