←back to thread

A computer upgrade shut down BART

(www.bart.gov)
232 points ksajadi | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 14:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.207s | source
Show context
nilsbunger ◴[05 Sep 25 17:06 UTC] No.45140894[source]▶
Seems like BART should do these upgrades only at low traffic times, like overnight Saturday night.
replies(1): >>45141464 #
ForOldHack ◴[05 Sep 25 17:52 UTC] No.45141464[source]▶
They did. They started before yesterday's shutdown, and worked all night, they tried to bring up the system for startup, and it came up, then crashed.

It was state of the art on 1962 when it was designed, and remained state of the art until the 1980s, when the signal system started breaking down, and the the late 80s upgrade which had a train presence glitch, which caused almost all the system to get resignaled.

So by the 2000s again it's showing its age, and they got a 32 processor zSeries mainframe.

Brake problem last week, and the this on Friday? Now it's getting like New York, even more. Whatsmatteryou?

replies(1): >>45142157 #
MangoToupe ◴[05 Sep 25 18:46 UTC] No.45142157[source]▶
What on earth does it do that requires a mainframe?
replies(3): >>45142325 #>>45142337 #>>45147273 #
1. nradov ◴[05 Sep 25 19:01 UTC] No.45142325[source]▶
It doesn't require a mainframe but that was the cheapest path to keep things running without rewriting the software. The IBM Z platform is very good at maintaining backward compatibility. If you don't constantly keep your applications software up to date with support for new platforms then eventually you find yourself with very limited platform options.