Effecting state water agency, Motor vehicle Division,state workers compensation, the state records and archives division, state engineers office,Risk mangement. Sounds like a mainframe problem. YIKES!

January 31, 2000

State Computers Crash The Associated Press SANTA FE -- A computer crash Monday had a ripple effect on the state water agency and threw a curve at the Motor Vehicle Division, which found itself unable to process driver's license applications. The malfunction also caused problems for the state worker-compensation administration and the state records and archives center, said Mark Moores, spokesman for the General Services Department. But there was no impact on the Legislature. "The vast majority of state offices are up and running normally," Moores said. The General Services Department operates the state's mainframe computer. On Monday morning, technicians detected a problem with one of the computer's routers. "The router is a kind of gateway into the mainframe," Moores said. "There are a number of routers on the system, and we are having problems with just one of them." Technicians will work through the night attempting to either work around the problem, reconfiguring the system to adapt, or to fix or replace the router entirely, he said. The MVD, the Worker's Compensation Administration, the State Records and Archive Center and the State Engineer's Office, which oversees state water supplies, all found their computer access impaired Monday, he said. "It was up and down through the morning. We decided to take it down instead of having this seesaw," Moores said. "We want to make sure it's fixed and fixed properly." The most high-profile problem was for the MVD field offices, he said. "It basically means the systems -- the Motor Vehicle Division and these others -- are not able to communicate with the mainframe computer, which means they are not able to process their applications. "If you're trying to get a new driver's license, they're not able to process them," he said.

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/8news01-31-00.htm

See also

http://greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=002SvX

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), February 01, 2000

Answers

This is an interesting one, while not clear that it is y2k, note that New Mexico DMV did have y2k-specific problems at the rollover, and it would make sense that the system would crash on the 31st day if it was somehow y2k-related (capacity or date-oriented). This one bears watching!!!!

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), February 02, 2000.

This is my error I think...I didn't see routers on here at first...sometimes routers fail "all on their own". OTOH, many routers were not compliant.

Note that a router does NOT necessarily mean a "mainframe problem" per se.

-- Bud Hamilton (budham@hotmail.com), February 02, 2000.