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SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

abc7news.com

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Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#11

Post by deweller »

jwells89 wrote: post #8
nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

Speaking naively (I have no insight into the situation), I would guess that this is probably the result of the officials in charge not having technical understanding and contracting it all out. Contractors aren’t going to be choosing the quick or cost-effective option, because that’d undercut their profits.

Also, it is difficult to sell a solution of "well - we aren't really modernizing the system, we are just putting a fix in place that pretends like it is a floppy drive."

I would guess higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-aid without really fixing the problem.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#12

Post by jdblair »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

You are correct that this would be much simpler if the only goal was to replace the floppy disk part of the system.

The floppy disk angle is there to make a good headline. The article makes it clear this is a much bigger project than just replacing the floppy disks.

  "The detail[ed] project schedule will be finalized once we have a contractor onboard. This is effectively a multi-phase decade long project that starts with pieces of market street subway and pieces in the surface. Ultimately our goal is to have a single train control system for the entire rail system," said Tumlin.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#13

Post by luxuryballs »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

I think the government is involved which means the task must primarily be an effort to funnel large amounts of money around to just the right people while facilitating all the best changes to whatever they can find within N degrees of separation from the project itself, (where N approaches infinity.)

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#14

Post by lepus »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

There are other concerns that need to be addressed where a hack wouldn't help:

>The transportation body says the train control system was built to last for just 20 to 25 years, meaning it surpassed its expected lifetime in 2023. In 2020, the Muni Reliability Working Group, said to be composed of local and national transit experts, recommended replacing the transit control system within five to seven years. [...] "We have to maintain programmers who are experts in the programming languages of the '90s in order to keep running our current system, so we have a technical debt that stretches back many decades," Tumlin told San Francisco's KQED in February 2023.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#16

Post by krallja »

deweller wrote: post #11
jwells89 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking naively (I have no insight into the situation), I would guess that this is probably the result of the officials in charge not having technical understanding and contracting it all out. Contractors aren’t going to be choosing the quick or cost-effective option, because that’d undercut their profits.

Also, it is difficult to sell a solution of "well - we aren't really modernizing the system, we are just putting a fix in place that pretends like it is a floppy drive." I would guess higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-aid without really fixing the problem.

> higher ups don't want to spend money on a band-aid without really fixing the problem

I have literally never had this problem in my career. Higher-ups LOVE to push the problem off to after the next budget cycle.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#17

Post by ammo1662 »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

It is not a technical problem. Who will be responsible for this migration?

Clearly no one wants to do that.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#19

Post by pessimizer »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

> However, budget challenges put the project's timeline into question. The SFMTA's train upgrade project isn't just a migration off of floppy disks but also a "complete overhaul of the current train control system and all its components, including the onboard computers, central and local servers, and communications infrastructure," Roccaforte said.

> Much more critical than the dated use of floppy disks is the system's loop cable, which transmits data between the central servers and the trains and, according to Roccaforte, "has less bandwidth than an old AOL dial-up modem."

Also, they're already late as hell, what's 5 more years? 5 1/4 isn't going to become more obsolete than it is at this point.

Re: SFMTA's train system running on floppy disks; city fears 'catastrophic failure'

#20

Post by snakeyjake »

nvahalik wrote: post #7

I don't understand. The retro community has proven reliably that a simple Raspberry PI can easily bit-bang floppy controllers. We have myriad floppy-to-SD card adapters. Surely a plug-and-play solution that removes the area of most concern (reliance on the media itself) should be easily achievable in a few months?

Playing video games on an old Apple II via a floppy emulator has a different set of requirements than a safety-critical application.

Lawyers will probably spend a year wrangling liability concerns.

I could probably replace a floppy drive on any system within a couple of weeks. I would not accept legal or financial liability for any such solution without an extremely thorough and slow review of all aspects of the project. edit: and an astronomically high paycheck.

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