Slammer worm crashed Ohio nuke plant net
They use Windows to run nuclear power stations? That's insane.
Posted to The Internet by Simon Brunning at August 20, 2003 01:32 PMWould it be any better if it was an IBM operating system, say OS/400? Or have they re-branded that as well recently?
If it's any consolation - in another life and a long time ago a colleague did some consulting to British Nuclear Fuels (or whatever they were called) and they were implementing a smart card access system for a nuclear plant on Windows. Which meant that if it blue screened you got stuck inside - nice.
Posted by: Andy Todd on August 20, 2003 02:27 PMYes, Andy, it would be *much* better.
I've been working on the '400 for nearly fifteen years (sob), and while it's not the most exciting OS around, it's *rock* solid. I've seen exactly 1 (one) OS crash, and 2 fatal disk failures during all that time - for most of which I've been aware of the status of several boxes.
To get better reliability than a '400, you need something *special*, like a Stratus box or the like.
Posted by: Simon Brunning on August 20, 2003 02:46 PMI gotta agree with Simon here, The AS400/iSeries is NOT exciting, it's NOT cutting edge, it's NOT a machine to play games on or to draw pictures on. It's boring, but reliable is always boring.
It is reliable, it's a rock solid machine ranging from PC size to mainframe, the hardware is pretty much bombproof and the operating system OS400 is the same. I can't remember the last hardware crash.
If you have 20 million customers it is the machine for you. If you want a buil;t in database, itls for you. If you want GUIs, flash, music etc. it's not for you.
And, I've never heard of one being hacked or hit by a virus. I'm sure I'll be pointed at some articles soon to prove otherwise, but I've never seen of heard of it.
Posted by: Stevan Rose on August 20, 2003 03:03 PM