For a little background story on the satellite antenna. I was building a monitoring device driver for an Antenna Control Unit (ACU). It's like a 4 rack-unit computer with special hardware for talking to the antenna motors (azimuth, elevation and polarization). After sending it a command, the device froze up, so we rebooted it. The CMOS battery was dead so when it came back up the date was wrong, but I did not notice. I sent it a command to reposition and it began moving to point below the horizon... The bad date meant that it had the wrong geo location position for itself. Well it turns out "below horizon" is really important because the building was just a structure to hold up the antenna and it was going to crash into the ground. Fortunately someone ran in and hit the STOP button while I was staring at the monitor. That day I learned that monitoring and alerting is important stuff.
nunez|5 years ago