First Ethernet Switch In Space 141
Rebecca will you marry me? writes "The ESA's Columbus laboratory module was added to the International Space Station in February, but Hewlett-Packard has only now chosen to reveal that the LAN onboard Columbus uses a ProCurve 2524 switch." HP admits it was the "most unusual and demanding" project ProCurve has done yet.
Title is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
I sent this in an e-mail to Taco when the article was still in the 'mysterious future' but that message must have been stopped by his spam filter or something.
Yeah yeah, I must be new here
Connect to the first router? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.space.com/spacenews/archive04/ciscoarch_042104.html
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:4, Informative)
The "HAM" sats did it a decade ago (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Why is this news? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:5, Informative)
here are some other notes:
http://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/ [klabs.org]
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:5, Informative)
The Orbiter uses the AP-101S, which was also used in military aircraft. NASA has a great deal of published history online regarding Shuttle Avionics here. [klabs.org]
This guy is sick (Score:3, Informative)
When i read this, i felt the need to puke. This guy says he is together with his girlfriend for two years and want to marry her but yet he does still not know what she likes. And in order to find out he shows a total lack of integrity and installs a keylogger on her machine! This is a cruel break of trust. I really hope she finds out and tosses him. This is imho absolutely sick behaviour. And whats even worse that he apparently is even proud of his act of dishonesty and blogs about it.
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why is this news? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Am I the only one... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure if you realize this, but 10base2 (aka thin net) doesn't use hubs. It's a shared 50 ohm coax with tees at each device and terminator plugs on each end. It uses CS/MACD like a hub, but the electronics and physical topology are totally different.
Re:Cool test methodology (Score:2, Informative)
Re:is anyone paying attention? (Score:5, Informative)
I'm going to greatly simplify this, but there are basically three networks onboard the space station. One is mostly off the shelf laptops and networking equipment that runs Windows and is used for crew support (email, procedures, timelines, photos, and such). It frequently needs maintenance, but it does the job. It's also (relatively) easy to certify and plug new hardware into it, so it can be updated frequently as commercial technology advances (for example, later this year the Thinkpad A31p laptops will be swapped out for newer models).
The second is a payload ethernet network that is used by the payload system to collect and downlink high volume data through the USOS Ku-band system. Failure of this network only impacts science collection and some support activities. These switches are part of this network. The standards are more stringent, but not to the level of stuff on which safety or mission success depends.
The third network is the core computer system, which is all custom built hardware/software wired up with MIL-STD 1553 data bus. This is the network which runs the core vehicle systems (life support, attitude control, what have you). The hardware and software are developed to a much more rigorous standard than the first two networks (and it obviously costs a lot more and is slower to update because the the long pole of certification and testing). Some of the machines on this network have been chugging along for nearly a decade without failure.
Re:And this is interesting because? (Score:3, Informative)