For want of a single ethernet card, an airport was lost ...

This is rich .. LAX airport shut down for hours because of a PC with a
duff network card. Now I wonder which major contractor has the
contract to set up and run the network at LAX, and how much in damages
and SLA costs he is looking at, when an airport gets shut down from 2
pm to midnight.

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2007/08/lax-outage-is-b.html

Wow, one little article, sooo much FUD. This quote really takes the cake:

(((Nothing like that *so far,* that is. But why not dwell on the notion that terrorists can remotely transform the US Customs Service into a weapon against innocent travellers?)))

Oh noes! The terrerists can kill all the airports by installing dodgy network cards in a machine!

I wonder if the machine had an RTL8139 card in there? :wink:

slight clarification on the fact: I happened to be at LAX around 9PM that day to pick up someone: LAX did not shut down, domestic flights were not affected, but all international flights that arrived after 2PM got held up on runways (which led to thousands of cars, which presumably waiting for picking up friends/relatives, circulating LAX).

Lixia

Well, if it is a mess of legacy equipment in there .. there's a high
chance that everything is connected to a hub, and the faulty network
card was flooding the network and causing collisions.

Now I trashed my last hub several years back so I am not sure if that
is the case, but it is quite plausible .. and the first explanation
that I can think of [besides a worm of course, but the article did say
faulty ethernet card].

--srs

Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:

...

Well, if it is a mess of legacy equipment in there .. there's a high
chance that everything is connected to a hub, and the faulty network
card was flooding the network and causing collisions.

...

Even more horrible thought: Maybe it was token ring