US Offender Monitoring System Goes Offline Because Someone Didn't Realize They Ran Out Of Storage
from the are-you-serious? dept
Apparently the system that tracks sex offenders and paroled prisoners and other convicts via electronic tags was totally unreachable for about 12 hours last week, because no one at the company who ran the system, BI, apparently noticed that they had run out of space on their servers. "In retrospect, we should have been able to catch this," claimed a spokesperson for the company. You think? While the data as to their whereabouts was still collected, and the people being tracked were unaware of the lack of monitoring while it was happening, it still makes you wonder why so many governments trust such a system to a company that can't even monitor when they're running out of data storage space.
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Well that bytes.
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Re: Well that bytes.
all the company had to do was install a little program to monitor drive space. hell, most 1st party server management software that i'm aware of does that already. and send notifications when certain thresholds are reached.
i can only imagine what the rest of the company's infrastructure is like. it's kind of pathetic...
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Re: Re: Well that bytes.
That was my first thought, too. Even if they have some sprawling DC to manage, a typical MSP program with a couple of scripts to trigger alarms should have handled this with ease.
More importantly, why does a privately run company get to contract with the govt. in a way that entrusts them with criminal information?
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Re: Re: Re: Well that bytes.
but seriously, I have worked mostly with HP servers and some IBM servers as well as an old digital unix box. ALL of them with internal software alerted you with the lack of drive space. you could get emails, pages, or even phone calls with pre-recorded messages. No excuse for running out of space. I was a contractor for one company with my last job where I would get alerts if they dropped below a Terabyte of hard drive space (1 TB would give them 3 days to add more or clean up). i would get paged then notify their CEO. He would then choose for me to come in and add space (new ranks with SANs) or their IT people would run a disk cleanup of sorts.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Well that bytes.
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Re: Re: Re: Well that bytes.
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Re: Re: Re: Well that bytes.
I looked in to getting in to this field at one point last year and it's not very hard to do this system, the problem is there's a huge patent war going on for the actual GPS tracking devices between 3 companies.
When I did the research I found that the parole officers have a case load that's not bearable. One parole officer for 30 or 40 people and each person has 3-4 hours of paper work the case worker has to do each week. They tend to only do a once a week round up of everyone and the criminals are free to do whatever the rest of the time.
With the tracking systems a private company can charge the city, who then charges the criminal, for taking some of this burden. They track the criminal and then if the person comes up as a suspect they pull the tracking records.
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Re: Re: Re: Well that bytes.
Corporations donate to Politicians.
Politicians then insure that those corporations get 'contracts' to enrichen them. The politician may even have an interest or own stock, thereby profiting as well.
This is why a person would put up millions to get a job that pays much, much less. Profits are made 'by proxy'.
It's not about safety or anything other than money, power, and control.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Well that bytes.
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Not "ran out of space"
What probably happened is that the record identifier was stored on a signed 32-bit variable or database column, and they hit the maximum. The solution was probably to change the type of the variable(s) or database column(s) to a larger integer.
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Re: Not "ran out of space"
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Re: Not "ran out of space"
In plain old common-or-garden MySQL, which you can download and use for free, you can declare a field as “bigint unsigned”, and that can hold any number up to 2⁶⁴-1. Use one of those fields for your primary key, and Bob’s your uncle. Simples!
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In other news...
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Re: In other news...
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Re:
medical records are WAY different that sex offender data... oh, right.
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SQL
SQL does correctly support -2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647 but who starts with -2,147,483,648? Most people start a DB with 0, effectively cutting this range in half.
The real question is what idiot didn't use a bigint(signed 64bit) for the key.
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Very Poor and Inacurate Article
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