Posted on 07/24/2010 10:30:38 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Testifying at a federal hearing on Friday, the chief electronics technician told of numerous instances of a "Blue Screen of Death" on the computer system responsible for monitoring and controlling drilling. The largest oil spill in American history may be due to a simple computer glitch.
The machine had been locking up for months, Williams said, producing what he and others on the crew called a "blue screen of death." "It would just turn blue. You'd have no data coming through," Williams said today, according to the New York Times' story. With the computer frozen, the driller would not have access to crucial data about what was going on in the well.
(Excerpt) Read more at hardocp.com ...
I should also add that even poorly coded third party software will cause BSOD’s. Of all the computer I have owned over the years, the BSOD’s I have had were caused by third party software and devices like the CD-ROM and the memory sticks.
For an industrial control computer it's not smart to willy nilly do a reboot.
What is a SCADA system?
High vibration, and high ELECTRO-MAGNETIC DISTURBANCES.
There are some huge motors and generators on that rig.
Yes, I am aware of that. I've also run across instances when an error in Windows occurs, you have no recourse but to reboot and when you do, you encounter a BIOS "BOOT DISK FAILURE" error. The only way around that is to pull the power cord from the power socket and wait one minute to allow the electrical charge to drain out of the motherboard. (on most motherboards, there is a green LED lamp that burns out telling you there is no more power going through the motherboard).
I’ve been running a SUSE Linux server continuously for the last 5 years without a crash, the only time I’ve had to restart it was after some doofus cut the power with a backhoe two years ago, and that was a safe shutdown on backup power.
Watch for a story by the DoomsDay crowd that a computer operator on the Deep horizon responded to the BSOD message and choose “Blow it up”...
At a company I worked for, they kept having problems with the CRT Screens getting distorted.
After having several (on different floors) getting the same problem, I noticed something.
All of them were located near the elevator shaft.
Obama Administration to Sue Microsoft for Oil Spill
Lot's of PC's out there still running Novell's PC DOS software....think of gnarly years old PC's in Auto Repair shops...where the big usage is pulling up part's manuals.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA !!!
Never heard that before.
Outstanding!
And ever so sadly.... too true.
LOL..
Where’s muh ‘’Abort, Retry, ‘Epic’ Fail’’ button?
The WH must have one or two popping up every day.
I have some servers hosted in France than came with ubuntu and I remotely changed them to SUZE and have a VM copy on my Mac. Suze is an outstandingly rock solid OS.
We’re pretty happy with it.
Courtesy of my Bro-in-Law, a Unix system admin for NASA.
“Hey, BP! How’s that working for you?”
On Zero's computer.
Watched the testimony, Williams said this Operations Computer was running NT and they were in the process of updating the entire system, but were having program compatibility issues, which were being worked on.
The part of his testimony was when he explained the “double handfull of rubber”. This rubber was from the BOP and he said it was caught in the drilling fluid after an accidental raising the string while to BOP was closed some 15 feet. He was not sure if the computer raised the string or did some operator “bumping the stick”. It would sure seem that once the BOP was stipped of the annual orings, it could not work propererly in an emergency.
One incident shortly before the blowout was when the BP head guy told the rig supervisor to “kick it up” meaning drill faster which resulted in loss of circulation and probably ultimately the blowout.
It also sure seemed that a lot of “Southern Engineering” was going on regarding alarms, BOP and drilling in general.
If you can get a chance to catch a re-run of this on CSpan it was very enlightening.
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