6 ms·

I don't know the last time the entire BART system got shut down. There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there are

I don't know the last time the entire BART system got shut down. There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages. No information as to the actual cause right now. Easy to speculate that it's a cyberattack, but I'm going to go for the free square and wildly guess it is a DNS issue. Best wishes and godspeed to the folks who are working on fixing the issue, whatever it is.

AStonesThrow 1y ago
> wildly guess it is a DNS issue Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular. Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.
- scarmig 1y ago
  Oh, that just updates the AAAA record for the Waymo. Totally harmless.
- ToucanLoucan 1y ago
  Do Not Slide. So just hit that if you lose traction, or if you're having a hard time getting your kid out of the park.
- dmoy 1y ago
  Sorry I will ruin the mystique: It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.
jeffbee 1y ago
I don't see any reason other than sheer speculation to suspect a cyberattack. It can just as easily have been some car crashed into a fiber optic thingy. The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.
- scarmig 1y ago
  All sheer speculation--the reference to cyberattack was from a now dead comment suggesting it was ransomware. It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  Last year in Paris Russian operations shut down the rail yards by tossing small wires over the rails - the train detector circuits work by shorting the rails together, so a handful of people were able to tell the rail network "do not proceed, stuck train ahead!"
culopatin 1y ago
I thought I heard that explosion and then just attributed it to a dream. Thanks for confirming
throwup238 1y ago
My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay [1]. The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread. [1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-keep-50-year-old-bart-trains-running-windows-98-ebay-and-scraps/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...
- mrguyorama 1y ago
  Forgive my arrogance, but nothing presented in that article should be such a big blocker. Spare parts for the traction gear sure, but none of the computing "problems" make any sense. It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably. This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
  - jkingsman 1y ago
    I'd wager it is technically a "cheaper" problem, but I'd also consider the axis that this is public transit, an industry known for being neglected budget-wise. Reverse engineering/reimplementation with competent parties may be laughably out of budget.
    - deepsun 1y ago
      It's neglected because public transport is usually subsidized in almost every country. It's just not directly profitable, like roads. US is in general very reluctant to invest into profitless projects.
      - 1y ago
gouggoug 1y ago
> There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages. Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area. I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated. Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically. This article[0] goes into detail about it. [0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythical-tl-bomber-8e130d208bb1 https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...
unstatusthequo 1y ago
Wow, you might have called the DNS issue. Nice. Can't be DNS, can't be DNS... It's DNS. From the article: "Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”

AStonesThrow 1y ago

> wildly guess it is a DNS issue Riding around in Waymos here, in the Jaguar models there is a button on the console labeled "DNS" and I have no desire to grab the steering wheel or adjust any other control, except every time I climb in, I am sorely, sorely tempted to press this "DNS" button because (1) I do not know what it does and (2) I have always had a soft spot in my sysadmin's heart for DNS in particular. Please do not reply to tell me what "DNS" means in a motor vehicle, because you will ruin the mystique.

scarmig 1y ago
Oh, that just updates the AAAA record for the Waymo. Totally harmless.
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
Do Not Slide. So just hit that if you lose traction, or if you're having a hard time getting your kid out of the park.
dmoy 1y ago
Sorry I will ruin the mystique: It's Do Not Schedule, carry over from when there was a human behind the wheel.

jeffbee 1y ago

I don't see any reason other than sheer speculation to suspect a cyberattack. It can just as easily have been some car crashed into a fiber optic thingy. The last time in recent memory there was a large BART disruption it had been caused by a motorcyclist who somehow flung himself over a fence into the trackway and died. That stopped service in and north of Oakland, which is more than half of the system by riders.

scarmig 1y ago
All sheer speculation--the reference to cyberattack was from a now dead comment suggesting it was ransomware. It doesn't seem likely to be a physical obstruction on the tracks, though, as the entire system is down and trains aren't running anywhere. I don't know if that's happened before.
bobmcnamara 1y ago
Last year in Paris Russian operations shut down the rail yards by tossing small wires over the rails - the train detector circuits work by shorting the rails together, so a handful of people were able to tell the rail network "do not proceed, stuck train ahead!"

culopatin 1y ago

I thought I heard that explosion and then just attributed it to a dream. Thanks for confirming

throwup238 1y ago

My free square is one of their control computers’ parallel ports frying out and now they’re unable to find a replacement because they buy them all as old stock off of ebay [1]. The ports are used as hard realtime GPIO so if some of the electrical isolation failed downstream, it could take out the motherboard. Back before Vista’s security model change, drivers could fill DMA buffers to the parallel ports controller and get hard realtime time outputs on Windows so there’s a quite lot of old industrial control systems running on a thread. [1] https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-keep-50-year-old-bart-trains-running-windows-98-ebay-and-scraps/ https://www.mercurynews.com/2022/09/17/how-clever-mechanics-...

mrguyorama 1y ago
Forgive my arrogance, but nothing presented in that article should be such a big blocker. Spare parts for the traction gear sure, but none of the computing "problems" make any sense. It's not like hard real time systems aren't available. More concretely, they talk about running a DOS virtual machine on a laptop to download logs from the cars, but there's no way that protocol is so complicated it couldn't be re-implemented reasonably. This sounds more like "It's cheaper to just buy old stuff off ebay than it is to actually care about this system"
- jkingsman 1y ago
  I'd wager it is technically a "cheaper" problem, but I'd also consider the axis that this is public transit, an industry known for being neglected budget-wise. Reverse engineering/reimplementation with competent parties may be laughably out of budget.
  - deepsun 1y ago
    It's neglected because public transport is usually subsidized in almost every country. It's just not directly profitable, like roads. US is in general very reluctant to invest into profitless projects.
    - 1y ago

gouggoug 1y ago

> There was a loud explosion earlier this morning, which may or may not be related, but there aren't any power outages. Loud explosions happen all the time in SF. Particularly in the Lower Nob Hill / Tenderloin area. I lived an Lower Nob Hill for many years and heard countless explosions, most often in the middle of the night (2am-4am) or early hours (6am). Often times these explosions M80s-M1000s being dropped and detonated. Someone was arrested back in 2019 and the explosions reduced dramatically. This article[0] goes into detail about it. [0]: https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythical-tl-bomber-8e130d208bb1 https://maxleanne.medium.com/tracking-san-franciscos-mythica...

unstatusthequo 1y ago

Wow, you might have called the DNS issue. Nice. Can't be DNS, can't be DNS... It's DNS. From the article: "Once the crews isolated that exact section that had the devices that were not properly communicating to each other, they were able to just simply disconnect them,” she told KQED. “That is what allowed us to finally get service back up and running.”