Case Study:
U.S. Customs’ Network Crash Strands Passengers
In August 2007, more than 20,000 international travelers were stranded for up to eleven hours because the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Agency could not process passengers due to a network crash. A network crash brings immigration to a halt. The crash and long outage was blamed on the cumulative effect of poor network planning, insufficient disaster preparation, a malfunctioning router and network interface card (NIC), mistakes in diagnosing the cause of the outage, and the lack of staff available to repair the network. Immediate Causes of the Crash and Crisis. The outage started with a malfunctioning NIC on a single workstation on the CBP’s LAN. Instead of simply failing, the NIC began sending a huge number of packets through the network causing a “data storm” that crashed the LAN. Later, a switch on the network crashed also, compounding the problem. Misdiagnosing the problem and blaming it on routers provided to Sprint wasted about six hours. Sprint tested the lines remotely, then sent a Sprint technician on site to run more tests, and finally concluded after six hours that the routers were fine, and that it was a LAN issue. Policy Remained in Force, but Not a Backup System. Because of a zero-tolerance policy, all travelers must be processed and screened through national law-enforcement databases located in Washington, D.C. There was a backup system consisting of a local copy of the database in case of a loss of connectivity to Washington, but the backup system ran on the same LAN, and there was no backup system for a LAN failure. U.S. Customs’ Network Crash Strands Passengers Human or Machine Error? Human errors were a bigger part of the outage than technological ones. Michael Krigsman, the CEO of Asuret (asuret.com), a Massachusetts-based software and consulting company, wrote on his blog that the cause was a breakdown common in low-cost equipment and gross incompetence. Some experts were baffled that a single NIC could have caused so much trouble. However, a single NIC can take down an older network such as the CBP’s, but not updated ones. Furthermore, if a network is not well managed, it increases the number of hours offline while the problem is identified and fixed. Newer networks are a lot more intelligent and able to self-diagnose. CBP’s Plan to Avoid Another Crash. The CBP recognized the need to improve its IT staff, equipment, and infrastructure. They planned to improve diagnostic capabilities at both the human and technological levels to prevent such a head-scratching incident from happening again. They also will get the right technology and staff in place at LAX and other ports.
Q1. What are the risks of a legacy network?
Q2. What were the technical factors that contributed to the failure of the backup system?
Your answer must be typed, double-spaced, Times New Roman font (size 12), one-inch margins on all sides, APA format and also include references.