Lawndale Tribune AND lAwNDAle News The Weekly Newspaper of Lawndale Herald Publications - Inglewood, Hawthorne, Lawndale, El Segundo, Torrance & Manhattan Beach Community Newspapers Since 1911 - Circulation 30,000 - Readership 60,000 (310) 322-1830 - November 10, 2016 LESD Students Participate in South Bay Hackathon The Hackathon was created with the goal to connect students to local professionals and to engage students in applied STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) activities, help the students build the necessary skillset needed to succeed in competitive college and career engineering pathways, and inspire young people to choose STEM careers. Eighty students from four area schools were challenged to figure out how an astronaut stranded on a remote planet could send an emergency message to colleagues. Photo provided by Lawndale Elementary School District DMV Computer Upgrades Were Never Completed By Rob McCarthy The Department of Motor Vehicles computer system that crashed last month and interrupted license and registration services for over a week wasn’t hacked. It just showed its age. The recordkeeping system that stores vehicle and personal information on millions of Californians underwent a multi-million dollar upgrade three years ago to existing hardware. The state’s technology agency shutdown the project early, and fired the contractor in early 2013. The California Technology Agency said at the time that the modernization project, which ran for seven years, would be re-evaluated. The first phase of the project on the DMV licensing system was nearly completed when the agency pulled the plug on the $200 million IT project. The agency’s early termination left older hardware running the DMV vehicle-registration system. It’s unclear how the unfinished project affected the massive outage that began on Oct. 24 and affected 122 DMV locations, including Hawthorne and Inglewood. The Technology Agency did not return a phone call asking about the status of the suspended DMV modernization project. The DMV said that a “catastrophic failure” of equipment on Oct. 24 caused the outage. Hard disks failed in both the front-end and backup systems. A department spokesman ruled out a cyber attack as the cause, insisting it was equipment-related and not an act of sabotage. “Absolutely not,” spokesman Artemio Armenta told The Herald when asked if the DMV’s recordkeeping system with millions of California drivers’ personal information was hacked. “There’s no evidence of that.” It wasn’t a matter of replacing broken equipment to restore computer service to the affected offices, Armenta told The Herald. The disks linked each of the 122 offices hardware to the DMV main system, and all of them that failed needed to be rebuilt. It took DMV employees working around-the-clock nearly a full week to restore the disks, according to its spokesman. Three offices, including Inglewood, were still disconnected as of last week. The South Bay offices in Hawthorne, Torrance, Inglewood, Culver City and San Pedro remained open during the outage with limited services. DMV examiners gave drivers license tests and clerks assisted walk-in customers with paperwork and questions. Online license renewals and vehicle registration were not affected by the equipment failure, according to the department. Inglewood was the last of the 122 locations to have service restored. The DMV posted a notice at 2 p.m. Nov. 2 saying that nearly all of its offices were at full service again except for Inglewood. By the next morning, an update said that each DMV location was back in service. The outage extended beyond the DMV field offices. The Automobile Club of Southern California, which serves as an agent of the motor-vehicle department, said a number of offices were unable to process vehicle registrations from Oct. 24 into November. The Manhattan Beach office was among the first locations to have DMV service restored, according to a AAA spokesman. Nearly two weeks after the computer-system crashed, the Rancho Palos Verdes AAA office had limited DMV service to customers. The office as of Nov. 3 wasn’t able to process commercial license plates, handicapped stickers and off-road vehicle stickers. “Their outage is pretty massive,” AAA spokesman Jeffrey Spring said last week. The Automobile Club’s IT staff worked directly with the DMV to get branches back online. Thirty AAA offices in Southern California were waiting for service to be restored on Nov. 3. Spring didn’t have a date when all of the club’s locations would be back online with the DMV. The DMV conducted a planned security update on the Friday before Halloween, which prolonged the service problems at some offices. The IT staff worked with its contractor over the first weekend to get the busier DMV offices back to normal. When staff returned to work on Monday, Nov. 1, computer service was still not available at the high-volume offices. The DMV described the events of Oct. 24 as a “perfect storm” of simultaneous harddrive failures that overwhelmed the system. It simply was not designed to handle massive failures in such a short period of time, the media were told. The department had never experienced a technological chain of events like it, spokesman Jaime Garza told reporters in Sacramento. The California DMV wasn’t using industry best practices to avoid losing both the frontend and backup systems simultaneously, according to published reports. The primary and the recovery systems should be kept apart and on separate power supplies, technology experts say. The department reportedly kept both the main and backup systems in the same hard - ware cabinet. Again, it’s uncertain whether the halted modernization project would have addressed the issue or made a difference. The DMV pledged to conduct a full The DMV IT modernization program began in 2006 after an earlier project called Info/ California was called a “hopeless failure” after $44 million were spent. What was supposed to be a five-year, $28 million effort lasted for seven years. The size of the project grew until the projected costs were $170 million over the original budget. State officials criticized the DMV brass for poor management of the project and for lacking computer- technology experience. The embarrassing episode led to a full investigation by lawmakers. The DMV is offering to waive late fees for vehicle registrations that could not be processed during the outage. Vehicle owners must file a waiver form or write a letter to the department asking for penalty forgiveness for missing the due date to renew a vehicle registration. The DMV charges a 10 percent penalty for being up to 10 days late and 20 percent for up to four weeks past due. DMV offices will be closed Friday, Nov. 11 in observance of Veteran’s Day. • Inside This Issue Certified & Licensed Professionals.......................2 Classifieds............................3 Entertainment......................5 Finance..................................3 Hawthorne Happenings....3 Legals................................ 6-7 Looking Up...........................4 Pets........................................8 Sports....................................4 Seniors..................................2 Weekend Forecast Friday Sunny 77˚/57˚ Saturday Partly Cloudy 77˚/58˚ Sunday Sunny 80˚/60˚
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