Using Outlook From Orbit 268
Pigskin-Referee writes with this excerpt from Office Watch: "On the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station they use Microsoft Outlook 2003, but not quite in the same way that us earthbound Earthlings do. The space shuttle Atlantis is orbiting the earth right now and the crew exchange emails with the ground a few times each day. Bandwidth is a constraint and you don't want the busy crewmembers bothered with spam or unnecessary messages so NASA has a special system in place. The crew use fairly standard laptops running Microsoft Outlook (currently Outlook 2003) with Exchange Server as the email host, but they don't link to the server using any of the standard methods."
80's tech (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:mail (Score:3, Insightful)
No one cares. Honestly.
Re:mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh Man Oh Man Oh Man, You're still using the command line? You gotta, I say you just gotta teach me that Arcane forgotten art!
Who needs a GUI when you've got the command line!
Wouldn't standard solutions be cheaper and easier? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just run a normal mailserver with a simple script to deliver any messages in the files uploaded? No need for the astronauts to mess with weird outlook files, just hit "check mail" on whatever client they prefer.
Re:80's tech (Score:3, Insightful)
BTW, what's ZMH for Earth Orbit?
Re:80's tech (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, but it works. Don't see an issue here.
Re:Mail Server on both ends (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah, no shit.
seriously, their method is on crack. SMTP supports queue of mail, use the god-damn feature and us a compressed link for the exchange.
put quotes on the uplink as necessary to prevent flooding (size, or number of messages) if it's an issue, but otherwise, where;s the problem to solve? SMTP worked when people used 1200bps modems for internet links.
Should be investigated (Score:3, Insightful)
As there is a new President in the Office and he doesn't really like (it seems) fantasy and unrealistic plans, he should also order his IT guys to start an investigation why standard, documented protocols like IMAP, XMPP aren't used. A visit from a Internet2 academic could be enough...
In fact, it is an International issue. ISS doesn't "belong" to USA, there are several billions of dollars of other countries out there.
While on it, they should also ask NASA about why on Earth "NASA TV is best viewed fullscreen with Windows Media Player", why there isn't a standard MP4 based live broadcast, why it defaults to Windows Media regardless of your setup...
Something really happening over there, trust me on that... These are the guys who had a genius idea of using Kermit as a protocol for communication before these "Outlook", "Windows Media Player" guys took over the job.
If there are people thinking "Oh but MS is an American company", let me remind, Red Hat, Sun Micro, IBM and lots of standards bodies are American too... That is in case the multi hundred billion dollar project should be a billboard for pathetic software setups.
Re:80's tech (Score:2, Insightful)
The question then is why use Outlook for such an awkward, for that tool, setup?
Familiarization with it and therefore minimizing training needs? Hm, I guess Orion might use webmail (or generally web 2.0) UI...
Re:mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Congratulations NASA, you've caught up with 1978! (Score:5, Insightful)
I was doing this 20 years ago with UUCP and/or sendmail.
HELO mx1.ground.nasa.gov
EXTN
QUIT
Push queued mail on demand to the orbiting mail server. Cron up the EXTN trigger or setup sendmail (which its happy to do) to handle the queuing whever you want.
Guess what, it works with exchange too!
I guess NASA spends its money on aeronautical engineers and not computer system admins. I'd be willing to bet that I could do it cheaper and more reliably even with exchange than there method, in their constraints of bandwidth and available connection time.
Seriously, I ran a FIDOnet hub, its not hard. :)
Re:80's tech (Score:4, Insightful)
We also would have accepted 'UUCP'.
Re:80's tech (Score:1, Insightful)
They are using Outlook/Exchange like a BBS that sends in digest mode only.
In that case, UUCP would be more appropriate since it is designed for burst-mode delivery of messages usually queued into a digest.
Re:mail (Score:4, Insightful)
It would be insightful if it were talking about something else.
Using the command line to read email is hardly a 'good' way to go about it.
It works and is usable for some, but even most shell users use 'a gui' like Pine or the like.
Its cute that you think you're bad ass cause you and the parent suggested the command line, but it just shows you're trying too hard to be something you aren't.
There are times to use the command line, and times when it is more efficient. Reading your daily email isn't one of those times, regardless of how cool you think it makes you to do so.
You aren't old school, you're just dumb and inefficient.
Re:Should be investigated (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't need anything fancy. I was using UUCP to do bulk and batched transfers of email, Usenet feeds and even files back in the early 1990s. It's become obsolete in a lot of cases, because everyone went from low-bandwidth limited connection modems to always-on broadband connections, but back in the day, I got all my email, newsfeed and even the odd file a few times a day via a scheduled UUCP transfers (which also sent any emails and posts I might have). Ah, the good ol' days of bang paths! Still, UUCP has its purposes, and it strikes me that it is a well-established protocol designed just for this sort of environment.
It just goes to show you how much damage has been done to tech by Microsoft, and this pervasive psychological need to use its shitty software, its shitty file formats and its shitty protocols, even with an organization populated by people who should be intimately familiar with Unix and its own much more rigorous and time-tested protocols. I mean, this is nothing more than FTPing mbox files back and forth, which, twenty years ago, would have had anybody with a moderate knowledge of mail systems and communications protocols rolling on the floor laughing.
Re:mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Whys that? Because the terminal window on your monitor takes less energy to display? Nope, thats not true without using an LED display (not LED backlight, the entire thing has to be LED or it doesn't make a difference).
You think that just displaying a GUI consumes energy? Please provide a citation. Any GUI on a modern OS doesn't require any processing power for displaying something on the screen that is static. You update the screen to current and it sits there.
Outlook isn't constantly drawing the entire display for each frame of your monitors refresh, the video card is, and it works the exact same way regardless of using the command line or a gui app, especially since you probably would end up using a terminal client on a system running in GUI mode and not traditional text console mode anyway.
Then couple in the additional wasted time from the incredibly niave and out of touch with reality since you have the idea that YOUR mail client is some how more efficient than theres.
Its cute that you have tunnel vision and are a retarded fanboy rather than having any sort of logical thought on the issue.
Good job, you've once again reassured my previous experiences that contrary to popular belief, MIT produces nothing but ignorant douche bags who think they know a lot more than they actually do.
Re:The lengths they go to... (Score:5, Insightful)
The ISS crew time needed to deal with mundane crap caused by their poorly designed computer infrastructure is, however, absurdly expensive.
This hurt to read. (Score:5, Insightful)
These OST files are tiny by ground-based standards – around at most 4MB for shuttle crew.
Amazing. A just over a half-dozen people and yet they manage to keep their email communications down to just 2,000 pages of text a day! How do they manage.
The OST file, now with outgoing emails, is copied back to NASA on the ground where the messages are sent, copied to the Sent Items folder and any new email is placed in the OST ready for the next upload.
Well, that makes sense. They reply with the same type of file that they receive with. If it's good for bandwidth one way, it's good for bandwidth the other I'd guess.
Because there’s limited bandwidth up to the shuttle it’s important to keep the OST fairly small so occasionally you’ll hear NASA controllers ask the crew to clean out their Outlook files (the OST).
Whajah? They're sending the *entire* mailbox both ways and just bouncing the same messages back and forth every time? How does that save bandwidth? How do these guys send pictures to each other, zip up an image of the entire hard drive?
I guess that explains why they need to transfer 2,000+ pages of text every day.
This sounds cumbersome and messy
True. Because it is cumbersome and messy.
it’s certainly not the way you’d do it here on the Green Hills of Earth.
It's also not the way I'd do it in space either, because of the bandwidth constraints.
However it makes sense
No it doesn't. Not under any circumstance does "send the whole thing back and forth every time" make sense if the thing you're trying to conserve is bandwidth.
You might also hear ‘CapCom’ asking the crew to shut down their copies of Outlook so that an OST transfer can occur. Outlook puts a file lock on any PST/OST file which prevents any copying (a problem anyone trying to do an Outlook backup might be familiar with).
Ahh, so that's it. They're not trying to conserve bandwidth. They're trying to conserve "thinking about it." Otherwise, they'd only have to shut down outlook when renaming "file.ost.xfer" to "c:\...\outlookdir\file.ost"
In addition, communication with the ground isn’t always possible (you’ll hear warnings of LOS – Loss of Signal during mission communications) so standard methods of email transfer like POP/SMTP, IMAP etc might not be reliable.
True. Why does it need to be email, though. Why can't they just send a psk-31 HF radiogram? or the even more fault tolerant HF packet radio? You only need a transmit station somewhere in the same hemisphere for that to work.
Hell, with a directional antenna (and a doppler-compensating transmitter), there's no reason why they couldn't use 3G cell service when over a country which has it. 300 miles up gets you a window of up to 11 minutes which would let you download quite a bit.
But I don't think bandwidth is really the issue. There's enough bandwidth to transmit live video for pete's sake, but email is somehow a problem? The issue is that "outlook is email." It clearly has simply never occurred to anyone in the chain that there might even be any other way to handle email-type communications.
Re:Mail Server on both ends (Score:3, Insightful)
Except for a couple things:
Re:Architecture? (Score:1, Insightful)
The ISS is a satelite. The bandwidth is low because the science apps and data collection going on needs lots of space and email is not as high of a priority.
Re:mail (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Who needs a GUI when you've got the command line!
Me?
I'm sorry, but when something breaks, I fall back to my working computer (with a GUI) with access to Google. :P
Re:mail (Score:3, Insightful)
1. You received the mail with my family pictures. I need the one that has a picture of my house in it. Find it and send it back to me.
2. You receive a ton of new albums in mp3 format, but since your mp3 player is short on space, you need to weed out the "interludes", which are each less than 1 megabyte. Save the songs, but delete the interludes.
3. Take a link from the email, go to that website, and post the albums and pictures to the "cloud" for backup.
Just a few things I'd think would really suck to do with a command line interface.
Using Outlook from Orbit - unreferenced to source (Score:2, Insightful)