NW_Pilot's Trans-Atlantic Flight -- All the scary details...

On 2006-10-06, Mxsmanic wrote:
Neil Gould writes:

I think its reasonable to think that some of the G1000's wiring or the
unit itself was damaged during this hack.

That would not generally cause software reboots.

Unless, of course, it was the power wiring. I suspect a momentary power
interruption could reboot a G1000. There's not much you can do about
that either (short of stuffing a 20 farad supercapacitor in the back of
the device or a fully fledged UPS).

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Dylan Smith writes:

Unless, of course, it was the power wiring. I suspect a momentary power
interruption could reboot a G1000.

It would not do so in synchronization with the software.

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Recently, Mxsmanic posted:

Dylan Smith writes:

Unless, of course, it was the power wiring. I suspect a momentary
power interruption could reboot a G1000.

It would not do so in synchronization with the software.

What gives you the impression that there was some "synchronization with
the software"? Nothing NW_Pilot reported would suggest it, and the
frequency and number of reboots implies something completely different.

Neil

Neil Gould writes:

What gives you the impression that there was some "synchronization with
the software"? Nothing NW_Pilot reported would suggest it, and the
frequency and number of reboots implies something completely different.

His description suggests that the system booted and went through the
same software process over and over. That is not a hardware problem.

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Mxsmanic wrote in
:

Neil Gould writes:

What gives you the impression that there was some "synchronization with
the software"? Nothing NW_Pilot reported would suggest it, and the
frequency and number of reboots implies something completely different.

His description suggests that the system booted and went through the
same software process over and over. That is not a hardware problem.


Care to put some money on that conclusion? Many, many years ago we
encountered a similar problem. Every symptom said it was software,
especially when one operating system would not encounter the problem yet
another one did. After several weeks we managed to isolate the exact
channel program sequence which caused the error. The hardware developers
confirmed that the channel program sequence was indeed valid. Further
investigation showed it to be an error in a circuit card supplied with a
field upgrade kit. Since each operating system used a slightly different
channel program to accomplish the same thing, the error only manifested
itself on one system.

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Marty Shapiro writes:

Care to put some money on that conclusion?

I have no money to spend on gambling, but I'm confident that the
conclusion is correct.

Many, many years ago we
encountered a similar problem. Every symptom said it was software,
especially when one operating system would not encounter the problem yet
another one did. After several weeks we managed to isolate the exact
channel program sequence which caused the error. The hardware developers
confirmed that the channel program sequence was indeed valid. Further
investigation showed it to be an error in a circuit card supplied with a
field upgrade kit. Since each operating system used a slightly different
channel program to accomplish the same thing, the error only manifested
itself on one system.

Those are the stories one remembers _because_ they are such remarkable
exceptions to the rule. I think the explanation in this case is much
more mundane: bad code.

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