

NASA to deploy PostgreSQL/Nagios on Space Station - moe
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2010-07/msg00394.php

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mahmud
The child in me wants to drop everything he is doing; a new job, and apartment
rent in 2 continents, and just go volunteer for this.

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adbge
Is there anything cooler or more badass than writing software _used in space_?
Whenever I'm told that a piece of software isn't fit for "mission critical
applications," I think of NASA.

I'd love to help out with this, but I'm afraid I lack the necessary skill set.
Still, maybe I will poke around the NDOUtils source anyways.

If anyone else is interested, here's a link to the NDOUtils source tarball:
[http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagios/files/ndoutils-1.x/nd...](http://sourceforge.net/projects/nagios/files/ndoutils-1.x/ndoutils-1.4b9/ndoutils-1.4b9.tar.gz/download)

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tomjen3
Yeah, it would be a lot cooler to go into space...

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openfly
NASA's commitment to open source is fairly great. And, postgresql is a really
great database. If you haven't used it before, I highly recommend giving it a
run.

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donw
It's just too bad they've got to pair it with Nagios; I'm fixing it so that I
never have to work with that POS ever again.

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nkassis
Well, as far as I can tell, all the other solutions they could be using suck
more, at least adding new modules to nagios is about as easy as writing a
script. Cause that's all you have to do. I've dealt with installs checking
hundreds of servers,routers and switches and our only major issue was needing
to distribute the checks onto multiple machines. One box will die trying to
ping,connect,... onto too many nagios boxes.

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pragmatic
Why Postgres? I'm a fan of it, but I wonder why they can't/won't use mysql?

(I'm looking for a good technical explanation, if anyone has one.)

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moe
My guess would be that NASA already uses postgres for other duties and is
hesitant to introduce a new database into their infrastructure - especially
one with so many known problems.

If I was them then I most certainly wouldn't want a database with silent data
truncation/corruption issues to come anywhere near my spaceships. Not even for
seemingly unimportant tasks because even those may cost amazing amounts of
money to fix if they go wrong a few thousand kilometers above groundlevel...

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ugh
Regrettably only a few hundred kilometers above groundlevel (the ISS is at a
height of about 350 km).

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avar
Isn't the computing power on the ISS almost purely made up of Thinkpad laptops
running Windows? Will they be running PostgreSQL and Nagios on a Windows
machine?

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nkassis
That's awesome. Nagios in space. Sounds like a cool comedy title. Were about
to install Nagios here too. One more point for management to like the idea ;p

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james2vegas
well, they want to deploy Pg/Nagios on the Space Station, pity Nagios's
support for anything other than MySQL is poor to non-existent.

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jncraton
It's not really a pity at all. It will be more work for them, but it's a win
for us as long as they pass their code to make it work back upstream.

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gourneau
Another NASA open source programmer checking in.

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helium
Well, I guess they just haven't heard how awesome NoSQL is yet :)

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tialys
I'm an intern at NASA this summer, and I've actually convinced the team I'm
working with to use Redis/Resque for the application we're working on.
Unfortunately it's 'just' a web application ;)

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superk
Makes me wonder about budget cuts...

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RyanMcGreal
"I felt about as good as anybody would, sitting in a capsule on top of a
rocket that were both built by the lowest bidder." \-- John Glenn on how it
felt waiting to for the rocket to launch

