Apr 25 2006
What’s going on with seamless.usgs.gov ?
Since April 21, I have not been able to view or extract any data from the USGS Seamless site, ostensibly the central distribution center for the US National Map. The site has been changing rapidly from day to day ever since and it seems that changes are underway so at least we know someone is working on it.. or hacking it to pieces. The last day or two they appear to have given up and are just redirecting people to gisdata.usgs.gov which, of course, has no mention of the outage on the home page.
When I develop an internet application, even if it’s only used by a few people, I usually seperate the development version from the stable, live version to minimize any downtime. And if you absolutely can’t keep the app running, at least put a big banner on the page indicating that the system is down so people (like me) don’t waste half an hour trying to figure out what they’re doing wrong. Is this too much to ask of the USGS? They are supposed to be the official portal for accessing our nation’s spatial data, right? And we’re not talking about a small server hiccup here, it has been down since at least April 21st with no public indication that problems are occuring on the site.
I just recieved an email this morning from the USGS web mapping admin. The emphasis is mine:
We apologize for any issues you may have experienced lately. The Seamless server, and all related map services will be unavailable for at least the next few days. During this time, the sites may still appear to be functioning. Some may ask for a password, and others may not show up at all. Normally our status messages are posted at http://seamless.usgs.gov. However, since this server has been affected by this outage, users are being re-directed to http://gisdata.usgs.net. We are in the process of posting a message here as well, which you will be able to monitor for any updates. We are estimating that the site will be available again by Monday May 1st 2006. Our team is working diligently to have this service available as soon as possible. We appreciate you patience during this time.
I really shouldn’t be surprised that a government agency botched it so badly; that seems to be the norm here in the US. But I’ve really come to rely on the seamless site for alot of data and it seems that 10 days of downtime for the sole distributor of our seamless national spatial data archive is a bit… amateur.
interesting. i have noticed that the last few downloads that I have requested have been delivered as ZIP archives which expanded to garbage files. I noticed this behaviour with mulitple web browsers across 3 (!) operating systems… very strange indeed.
As federal budgets get tighter and tighter in the civilian sector, we will see a lot of things coming out, good, bad and otherwise - one thing to keep your eye on will be the Geospatial Line of Business effort coming out of the President’s Executive Office, which will strive to consolidate geospatial efforts across agencies. I think what we are seeing at USGS may be symptomatic of bigger issues. My concern is in what we may end up losing as a result.
With budgets getting tighter and tighter, at least we can look overseas with a warm feeling watching all our money getting spent on that splendid war. Election day is right around the corner–time to get some people in Congress with a backbone and a brain.
So I go to http://gisdata.usgs.net and the links to Elevation data take me to the Seamless server! So what is the point of going to http://gisdata.usgs.net anyways?
I got the seamless server to come up but the map doesn’t come up and it is soooooo very slow. The new server must be an 80806 or something.
I would be embarassed if I worked at the USGS but these people don’t care. They just want their paycheck every two weeks. And if anything
involves more than an hour of work per day… Forget about it. I think there is something deeper here below the surface that we don’t know about
going on at the USGS. First LandSat7 goes down now this. I say fire them all and contract it out.
I mean this mapping application should not be so difficult given it has not changed substantially in the 9 or so years it has been around.
Also this will be a boom to private companies selling map data.
I agree, I notice outages from USGS and Terraserver-usa.com at least once a week. I work for the government (different area but similar) and we would be hung out to dry if our data uptime wasn’t 99.9%. At least they are providing this service, and I’ve gotten by constently updating my users as to the USGS WMS/Layer server status.
Sorry for another comment. But in addition they have changed all the layer names to ATLAS_XX_XX and ATLAS_XX_XX_LABELS
FYI
Don’t blame the USGS, blame Microsoft. Sounds like this was because of one of their new security patches that they were forced to install:
http://igskmncnwb010.cr.usgs.gov/website/lidar/bb/index.php?showtopic=87
How can you not blame USGS? They installed the untested patch. And they have been down for another two weeks.
It seems to me, anytime we ever patch we always test the patches in the development/test env first.
And shame on USGS for running microsoft products, thats the other half of the problem. Why would they not be using an opensource WMS server under some flavor of *nix escapes me. Why change all the layer names?
Regarding comment 4: “I say fire them all and contract it out.”
It’s already been done. Many of the staff behind the seamless surver ARE contractors.