CNETNate writes "With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters, a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth, and around a hundred IBM ThinkPad notebooks, the consumer technology aboard the $150 billion International Space Station is impressive. It's the responsibility of just two guys to maintain the uptime of the Space Station's IT, and they have given CNET an in-depth interview to explain what tech's aboard, how it works, and whether Windows viruses are a threat to the astronauts. In a related feature, the Space Station's internal network (which operates over bandwidth of just 1Mbps) and its connected array of Lenovo notebooks is explained, along with the tech we could see in the future."
In the very long run, after we colonize Mars and possibly the Moon, latency issues will become even more severe. It will be interesting to see whether we will simply give them separate networks or have those networks as part of the internet. If the second occurs, we may need new protocols to deal with the large latency and related issues.
Colonize? I think you mean conquer, and enslave the troglodites populations to mine dilithium for our fast than light ships. Hopefully we'll be able to genetically modify navigators for them. Or find some handsome young captains to fly around and defeat gods.
In the very long run, after we colonize Mars and possibly the Moon, latency issues will become even more severe. It will be interesting to see whether we will simply give them separate networks or have those networks as part of the internet. If the second occurs, we may need new protocols to deal with the large latency and related issues.
We already have networks with latency comparable to round trip Earth/Mars connections. Its called Time Warner Cable.
It's going to vary since both Earth and Mars orbit the Sun. The closest distance is around 55 million km. The furthest is around 400 million km. At 55 Mkm, it's about 3 minutes. At 400 Mkm it's about 22 minutes.
In the very long run, after we colonize Mars and possibly the Moon, latency issues will become even more severe. It will be interesting to see whether we will simply give them separate networks or have those networks as part of the internet. If the second occurs, we may need new protocols to deal with the large latency and related issues.
Er, Wow. You're worried about network latency and we haven't even put the first human-inhabitable structure on our moon yet. Cripes man, perhaps you should step back just a few parsecs and realize we might just need stuff like an oxygen-rich environment first, for when you want to hyperventilate whilst flogging your Captains Log to Martian Porn some 250,000 miles away...
I saw a very interesting talk by Vint Cerf [wikipedia.org] a while back. Apparently he is working with NASA to write the protocols that will be used for the interplanetary Internet.
"One of the T61ps is a server, making it a client/server network with a couple of routers and an Ethernet backbone.."
You're telling me that with over a hundred machines up there that they have a single point of failure for their domain architecture? And it's a laptop? Hey NASA, ever hear of high-availability?
Granted they probably don't use that many domain resources, but you'd think if they were going to use any specific kind of tech that they would make sure it was redundant. You'd think with how muc
They'll probably just dosconnect the failed one and plug in another one. Remember the costs per kilo of getting payload into orbit. IMHO, using only laptops makes common sense.
The article doesn't really talk about the evolution of the network over the life of the station. I'd suspect they have all those laptops for the hard disks, since I imagine they're doing a variety of possibly data-intensive experiments up there that can't deal with the latency getting to a hard drive on the ground and back.
Obviously, they could use external hard drives, but probably couldn't justify a standalone disk without a fully functional PC.
Maybe a combination or redundancy and price/power ratio? When you're sending something in to space the weight is more important the price, so it may cost them similar amounts to send up 100 laptops vs 1 huge server, but it's also a lot harder to break 100 laptops and much easier to "fix" a laptop if you have 100 spares (leave the old one in a pile and replace it when you land). One factor might be that laptops are already designed to be light, while weight isn't really a factor for most servers (so they'd have to design their own). Laptops are also designed to deal with bumps, so they may survive re-entry better.
The max ground distance for unamplified WiFi is about 200km. The ISS orbits between 340 and 350km, therefore I say we all point our collective WiFi antennae up and try and see the first person to connect up to their network. Of course, you'd only have about 90 minutes of access as I recall; the ISS orbits too fast for much more access time.
Of course, you'd only have about 90 minutes of access as I recall; the ISS orbits too fast for much more access time.
The orbit is about 91 minutes long.. An ideal ground track is only a couple minutes... talk to the ham radio folks whom use a couple watts to a voice FM signal on an external antenna. The wifi is much faster (needs higher SNR) and has an inside antenna and have a zilionth of a watt, so unlikely.
OK you get two points for +1crazy. Point 1; the ISS completes an ENTIRE orbit in 90 minutes. That means that if you had an antenna pointed straight up, and say you used a moderate gain antenna with a 5 degree beam, you will get just over ONE minute of access before you need to adjust the antenna. You would need a pretty sophisticated ground tracking mechanism to have any hope of keeping the connection alive for more than a minute.
On to 2. WiFi uses an ack timeout in the microsecond range. This means that for a typically configured transceiver, you are racing the speed of light with that timeout window. The practical limit happens to be around 20 miles, or 32 kilometers. Not quite enough to get you to the ISS.
Up to 48 megs. My guess is 10 megs came about because someone told a journalist, "its about as fast as old fashioned thinnet" whom thought to himself, thinnet is 10 megs, so the journalist says 10 megs.
And/or there may be a critical link in the path that is, literally, a piece of thinnet coax, or an old fashioned 10 meg only cat5 cable, so the overall path cannot exceed 10 megs.
ISS orbits at between 278 km (173 mi) and 460 km (286 mi) from Earth.
LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites orbit at about 400 km, and Geostationary sats orbit at 35,786 km over the equator.
I'm connected to a GEO sat right now (I'm in the Gulf of Aden atm), and ping time is just under 800ms. Not great, admittedly, but really not bad.
I imagine NASA keeps their pipe pretty full 24/7 and that might generate some lag, but at their altitude, they are probably getting 300ms ping times or better. It also depends on where your data goes once it hits the Earth station. We had a horrible bottleneck at Eik, Norway so we routed the data through Mirimar, Florida and it lopped off about 600ms from our ping time.
I'm guessing NASA has a pretty sweet peering arrangement;)
Actually I am sure that the ISS is using TDRS or it's replacment for their link. I would bet that the ISS has at least one geosynchronous bounce at all times.
"Crew members aboard the ISS can request specific films and TV shows to be uploaded to a central file server, which they can then watch on any of the Station's laptops."
Not necessariily; they could be getting the movies with the MPAA studios' blessing. It's only "piracy" if the copyright holder doesn't give permission.
> With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters...
Is that a mission requirement? If they upload a foreign film or "Ishtar" will the entire file system crash? Will they get in trouble if they watch "Dark Star"?
As someone who works in space flight hardware, I will state what I think is obvious to most slashdotters: These are not just "consumer grade electronics." True, they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product, but they have to meet a very stringent set of requirements to operate in space.
*They need to cool themselves effectively despite having no gravity, which means heat doesn't rise and you lose all naturally convective heating
*They need to be radiation hardened to mitigate against b
"You'd be surprised at how many computers would survive on the ISS. I can't think of an occurrence when we've have a computer fail from the radiation itself. It may reduce the lifetime of how long we can keep the equipment in orbit, but most of the time the failures are just like the ones here on the ground -- we'll have a hard-drive failure or we'll have an application problem and end up reloading the machine."
As someone who works in space flight hardware, I will state what I think is obvious to most slashdotters:
First, "works with space flight hardware" != "works with the ISS's COTS based network". Second, what is 'obvious to everyone' is frequently wrong.
These are not just "consumer grade electronics." True, they were based heavily or solely on an existing consumer product, but they have to meet a very stringent set of requirements to operate in space.
First off, don't be coming here and making false cl
"Every week we uplink new virus definitions. We uplink and deploy them straight away, so we're running pretty much as up-to-date as we can get. If there ever was a virus, we can pop that computer off the network, isolate it and figure out what the problem is. Even if it needs a complete re-wipe, it's pretty easy to quarantine. But the way our IT is set up, there's a network on board, there's
What happens to these laptops when they are decommissioned? They mentioned these thinkpads are from 2002 (which makes them the same vintage as the ones I use for myself at home); will they be sold off when they are replaced? I would love for my next laptop to be one that spent several years in orbit!
Hey, I have an idea! Maybe thepiratebay.org could relocate their servers to be colocated on the ISS. I think the upper stratosphere is out of the Swedish court's jurisdiction!;)
Our scientific equipment "Declic" was sent to the ISS last august. It runs Linux and uC-OS II on a whole pile of microprocessors. The Linux of the part of the system that we built was completely custom built based on "linux from scratch". For an interesting read: Linux Journal [linuxjournal.com]
The 2.6 kernel was state of the art when we built it, but we needed its lower latency features.
"One thing that really impacts the crew's day-to-day operations is if the file server itself fails. This forces them to reload the hard drive and re-establish all the network drives and all the apps. They actually have to get out the media and load the image to the hard drive. That's a significant hit for the crew because we can't do everything for them from the ground.
Jesus Christ, given the cost per minute keeping those guys up there, I'd think they'd at the very least have redundant servers with redundant media.
NASA requires you to use the thinkpads. Not that they are anything special other than they have gone through a battery of tests and have a few mods to help with cooling and power requirements. Offer them all you want for free and they'll say no. The main reason for so many are that each one more than likely is dedicated to a single use. If you have 60 experiments, then you have 60 laptops. It's quite a bit of effort and paperwork to certify that any application you need to run on a laptop plays nicely with
Issues with such networks generalize to Mars (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Issues with such networks generalize to Mars (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously just "separate" networks bridged by a few high-speed high-latency links. Exactly like how continents are done now.
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Re:Issues with such networks generalize to Mars (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Issues with such networks generalize to Mars (Score:5, Funny)
We already have networks with latency comparable to round trip Earth/Mars connections. Its called Time Warner Cable.
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Re:Issues with such networks generalize to Mars (Score:5, Informative)
It's been done: http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2008/nov/HQ_08-298_Deep_space_internet.html [nasa.gov]
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It's going to vary since both Earth and Mars orbit the Sun. The closest distance is around 55 million km. The furthest is around 400 million km. At 55 Mkm, it's about 3 minutes. At 400 Mkm it's about 22 minutes.
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hmmmm... so, what would the 'cost' of spam sent to mars be? and how easy would it be to DoS that single, high latency link?
Got UUCP? (Score:5, Informative)
Once upon a time, large portions of the internet were "store and forward."
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Colonization Priorities...Space Porn. (Score:3, Interesting)
In the very long run, after we colonize Mars and possibly the Moon, latency issues will become even more severe. It will be interesting to see whether we will simply give them separate networks or have those networks as part of the internet. If the second occurs, we may need new protocols to deal with the large latency and related issues.
Er, Wow. You're worried about network latency and we haven't even put the first human-inhabitable structure on our moon yet. Cripes man, perhaps you should step back just a few parsecs and realize we might just need stuff like an oxygen-rich environment first, for when you want to hyperventilate whilst flogging your Captains Log to Martian Porn some 250,000 miles away...
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I saw a very interesting talk by Vint Cerf [wikipedia.org] a while back. Apparently he is working with NASA to write the protocols that will be used for the interplanetary Internet.
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Using it to transport water, food, and air quickly and cheaply would be nice too.
One server? (Score:2, Interesting)
You're telling me that with over a hundred machines up there that they have a single point of failure for their domain architecture? And it's a laptop? Hey NASA, ever hear of high-availability?
Granted they probably don't use that many domain resources, but you'd think if they were going to use any specific kind of tech that they would make sure it was redundant. You'd think with how muc
Re:One server? (Score:4, Interesting)
They'll probably just dosconnect the failed one and plug in another one. Remember the costs per kilo of getting payload into orbit. IMHO, using only laptops makes common sense.
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the better question is why they have a hundred laptops for a crew of 3-6 max.
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The article doesn't really talk about the evolution of the network over the life of the station. I'd suspect they have all those laptops for the hard disks, since I imagine they're doing a variety of possibly data-intensive experiments up there that can't deal with the latency getting to a hard drive on the ground and back.
Obviously, they could use external hard drives, but probably couldn't justify a standalone disk without a fully functional PC.
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For the mass of a NAS, you can have an entire notebook. More functionality out of the latter, so that would be preferred.
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the better question is why they have a hundred laptops for a crew of 3-6 max.
One Tang spill could render several laptops useless. Perhaps this is a redundancy measure.
Re:One server? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Interesting thought (Score:2, Interesting)
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Imagine a Beowulf satellite constellation of those.
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Of course, you'd only have about 90 minutes of access as I recall; the ISS orbits too fast for much more access time.
The orbit is about 91 minutes long.. An ideal ground track is only a couple minutes... talk to the ham radio folks whom use a couple watts to a voice FM signal on an external antenna. The wifi is much faster (needs higher SNR) and has an inside antenna and have a zilionth of a watt, so unlikely.
Re:Interesting thought (Score:5, Informative)
OK you get two points for +1crazy. Point 1; the ISS completes an ENTIRE orbit in 90 minutes. That means that if you had an antenna pointed straight up, and say you used a moderate gain antenna with a 5 degree beam, you will get just over ONE minute of access before you need to adjust the antenna. You would need a pretty sophisticated ground tracking mechanism to have any hope of keeping the connection alive for more than a minute.
On to 2. WiFi uses an ack timeout in the microsecond range. This means that for a typically configured transceiver, you are racing the speed of light with that timeout window. The practical limit happens to be around 20 miles, or 32 kilometers. Not quite enough to get you to the ISS.
Good luck, though!
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So is there a network of geosynchronous satellites that provides its 10 mbps link to the ground?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satellite_System [wikipedia.org]
Up to 48 megs. My guess is 10 megs came about because someone told a journalist, "its about as fast as old fashioned thinnet" whom thought to himself, thinnet is 10 megs, so the journalist says 10 megs.
And/or there may be a critical link in the path that is, literally, a piece of thinnet coax, or an old fashioned 10 meg only cat5 cable, so the overall path cannot exceed 10 megs.
Re:ISS spotting (Score:4, Funny)
a few minutes? you will at least be able to see it for several degrees.
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"a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth" (Score:2)
With a LOT of lag.
Re: "a 10Mbps Internet connection to Earth" (Score:5, Interesting)
Nah, wouldn't be so bad.
ISS orbits at between 278 km (173 mi) and 460 km (286 mi) from Earth.
LEO (Low Earth Orbit) satellites orbit at about 400 km, and Geostationary sats orbit at 35,786 km over the equator.
I'm connected to a GEO sat right now (I'm in the Gulf of Aden atm), and ping time is just under 800ms. Not great, admittedly, but really not bad.
I imagine NASA keeps their pipe pretty full 24/7 and that might generate some lag, but at their altitude, they are probably getting 300ms ping times or better. It also depends on where your data goes once it hits the Earth station. We had a horrible bottleneck at Eik, Norway so we routed the data through Mirimar, Florida and it lopped off about 600ms from our ping time.
I'm guessing NASA has a pretty sweet peering arrangement ;)
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Well, Im sure it's better than I used to get playing Quake over a 56k modem.
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Actually I am sure that the ISS is using TDRS or it's replacment for their link. I would bet that the ISS has at least one geosynchronous bounce at all times.
Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
"Crew members aboard the ISS can request specific films and TV shows to be uploaded to a central file server, which they can then watch on any of the Station's laptops."
Space pirates!!
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
"NASA, can you beam up Zombieland.2009.R5.ScENeGr0up.avi? That shitty TS is driving us nuts!"
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Space pirates!!
Not necessariily; they could be getting the movies with the MPAA studios' blessing. It's only "piracy" if the copyright holder doesn't give permission.
I know, "woosh" and all that.
Why does it have to be a blockbuster? (Score:2)
> With its own file server for uploaded Hollywood blockbusters...
Is that a mission requirement? If they upload a foreign film or "Ishtar" will the entire file system crash? Will they get in trouble if they watch "Dark Star"?
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It's very sad (Score:4, Insightful)
It's very sad, with the real high tech shit aboard the ISS, that consumer grade electronics are featured as 'the tech of ISS'.
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That's Slashdot for you. The CNet article is titled "Interview: The Space Station's IT guys".
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Re:It's very sad (Score:4, Informative)
FTFA:
"You'd be surprised at how many computers would survive on the ISS. I can't think of an occurrence when we've have a computer fail from the radiation itself. It may reduce the lifetime of how long we can keep the equipment in orbit, but most of the time the failures are just like the ones here on the ground -- we'll have a hard-drive failure or we'll have an application problem and end up reloading the machine."
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First, "works with space flight hardware" != "works with the ISS's COTS based network". Second, what is 'obvious to everyone' is frequently wrong.
First off, don't be coming here and making false cl
but.. (Score:2)
Pentium 4... (Score:5, Funny)
housing 68 IBM ThinkPad A31 laptops from 2002, each boasting a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard drive.
It turns out these double as the main heat supply for the ISS as well.
ISS isolated from windows viruses ? (Score:2)
"Every week we uplink new virus definitions. We uplink and deploy them straight away, so we're running pretty much as up-to-date as we can get. If there ever was a virus, we can pop that computer off the network, isolate it and figure out what the problem is. Even if it needs a complete re-wipe, it's pretty easy to quarantine. But the way our IT is set up, there's a network on board, there's
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Just in case?
Military networks are isolated and still use Anti-Virus, and they have still had some publicized infections.
"mankind's first permanent space colony" (Score:4, Informative)
"mankind's first permanent space colony"
Someone needs to tell Mark Harris that the ISS is scheduled to be deorbited 1Q 2016 before he moves in to his condo there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station [wikipedia.org]
-- Terry
Unaddressed question (Score:4, Interesting)
ISS colocation facility? (Score:3, Funny)
Hey, I have an idea! Maybe thepiratebay.org could relocate their servers to be colocated on the ISS. I think the upper stratosphere is out of the Swedish court's jurisdiction! ;)
Linux 2.6 in a scientfic system on the ISS (Score:5, Interesting)
The 2.6 kernel was state of the art when we built it, but we needed its lower latency features.
No backup file server? o_O (Score:5, Informative)
"One thing that really impacts the crew's day-to-day operations is if the file server itself fails. This forces them to reload the hard drive and re-establish all the network drives and all the apps. They actually have to get out the media and load the image to the hard drive. That's a significant hit for the crew because we can't do everything for them from the ground.
Jesus Christ, given the cost per minute keeping those guys up there, I'd think they'd at the very least have redundant servers with redundant media.
Re:Wow (Score:4, Insightful)
Each module probably has it's own laptop per experiment. Not to mention stored laptops for when the space shuttle crew comes on board.
These systems are most likely being used for data input/output and monitoring of experiments. It would be silly to do everything from one computer.
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