Error: Obamacare Website Resets User Passwords

Error: Obamacare Website Resets User Passwords

Apparently the ObamaCare website has been forced to reset user passwords !!!

And, now people returning to check things out must create a whole new account !!!

Complete F-A-I-L

Looks like they're at *ObamaCare Defcon 2*

Thanks to the disastrous technological failures of the Obamacare healthcare.gov website, the website has now been forced to reset the passwords for all users. According to ArsTechnica.com

“According to registrants speaking with Ars, individuals whose logins never made it to the site's database will have to re-register using a different username, as their previously chosen names are now stuck in authentication limbo.”

Failures of the Obamacare website have meant that thousands of potential applicants have been unable to register. ArsTechnica reports that federal contractors are “scrambling to deploy more fixes,” and says that technical support centers are buckling under the weight of calls looking for help. Ars adds that “changes made to profiles already within the system may not be saved either.”

Seriously ?


Error: Obamacare Website Resets User Passwords

Resetting a password doesn't mean making a new account.

Great attempt at hyperbole though.

And after looking at the article, the issue is that the accounts were made, but the authentication of them failed.

Here's the irony on the whole situation. The GOP keeps blowing up how much of a failure these websites are because they're getting hammered to the extreme and having issues. However the government could have spent millions more on servers to handle the initial amount of traffic and signups, but then after the first wave of registration happens they would be sitting with a bunch of worthless equipment.

It's ironic because they took the conservative option with setting up their system, are seeing system errors because of it, and conservatives are making fun of them for it.

They should have wasted a billion dollars on additional equipment, so y'all wouldn't have something to laugh at them for, but then someone would be yelling about them wasting all that extra money.

Evil_Santa
Resetting a password doesn't mean making a new account.

Great attempt at hyperbole though.

Actually the article says the user has to reset their username, since the original one is " locked in limbo."

I'd think you might have to redo everything, but the article does not say one way or the other.

reply to post by SunnyDee


I made an edit, and considering business systems administration is my field, i have a better understanding about what the government is dealing with then 99% of the people on these boards. Their servers are being flooded and they are having having issues. It happens often in the IT world when new services open up and the hardware can't handle the sheer volume of traffic.

See my previous post about how the situation is ironic.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Edit: Either way - the topic of the thread (go breibart, quality propaganda) is misleading.

Evil_Santa
It's ironic because they took the conservative option with setting up their system, are seeing system errors because of it, and conservatives are making fun of them for it.

They should have wasted a billion dollars on additional equipment, so y'all wouldn't have something to laugh at them for, but then someone would be yelling about them wasting all that extra money.

edit on 9-10-2013 by Evil_Santa because: (no reason given)

I think you just made a lot of assumptions in the above sentences. How do you know what they did? Maybe they have more than enough equipment. Maybe they spent excessive amounts of money. maybe they hired under-qualified programmers.

You don't know the facts, none of us do.

Evil_Santa
reply to post by SunnyDee

 

I made an edit, and considering business systems administration is my field, i have a better understanding about what the government is dealing with then 99% of the people on these boards. Their servers are being flooded and they are having having issues. It happens often in the IT world when new services open up and the hardware can't handle the sheer volume of traffic.

See my previous post about how the situation is ironic.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Edit: Either way - the topic of the thread (go breibart, quality propaganda) is misleading.

edit on 9-10-2013 by Evil_Santa because: (no reason given)

Lots of us nowadays understand the situation of rollouts. Doesn't mean you know the facts on this matter unless you worked on it.

reply to post by SunnyDee


I know that i have 5 years of experience working in IT as a systems administrator, and one company saw heavy volumes during a 2 week signup period at the start of each semester of school. There were always issues during this period because the hardware was pushed to it's max and when that happens - errors happen.

Please tell me again about how i don't know anything, i would love to hear more.

SunnyDee

Evil_Santa
reply to post by SunnyDee

 

I made an edit, and considering business systems administration is my field, i have a better understanding about what the government is dealing with then 99% of the people on these boards. Their servers are being flooded and they are having having issues. It happens often in the IT world when new services open up and the hardware can't handle the sheer volume of traffic.

See my previous post about how the situation is ironic.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Edit: Either way - the topic of the thread (go breibart, quality propaganda) is misleading.

edit on 9-10-2013 by Evil_Santa because: (no reason given)

Lots of us nowadays understand the situation of rollouts. Doesn't mean you know the facts on this matter unless you worked on it.

So then we agree - launches are painful. Having a successful launch with minimal issues, is practically a miracle. So why is the government being held to a higher standard then the rest of the world, and being made fun of when they're encountering the same issues that the rest of the world deals with?

Oh - because it makes for great talking points, and lulie conversations "Hehe, the gubermunt is so terribul at everything!"

Evil_Santa
Here's the irony on the whole situation. The GOP keeps blowing up how much of a failure these websites are because they're getting hammered to the extreme and having issues. However the government could have spent millions more on servers to handle the initial amount of traffic and signups, but then after the first wave of registration happens they would be sitting with a bunch of worthless equipment.

It's ironic because they took the conservative option with setting up their system, are seeing system errors because of it, and conservatives are making fun of them for it.

They should have wasted a billion dollars on additional equipment, so y'all wouldn't have something to laugh at them for, but then someone would be yelling about them wasting all that extra money.

edit on 9-10-2013 by Evil_Santa because: (no reason given)

I could've set up a site around the 'typical' "LAMP"- Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP... or even DotNetNuke or similar ASPNET / SQL solution and had better results than they've had.

If the site's database is being hammered, as you allude, the DB engine should be rolling back transactions instead of committing them, and the site's login should be dealing with that in commensurate fashion.

This is a tech / IT failure of comical proportions, brought to you full face with tar and feathers courtesy of the Democrat mules.

abecedarian

Evil_Santa
Here's the irony on the whole situation. The GOP keeps blowing up how much of a failure these websites are because they're getting hammered to the extreme and having issues. However the government could have spent millions more on servers to handle the initial amount of traffic and signups, but then after the first wave of registration happens they would be sitting with a bunch of worthless equipment.

It's ironic because they took the conservative option with setting up their system, are seeing system errors because of it, and conservatives are making fun of them for it.

They should have wasted a billion dollars on additional equipment, so y'all wouldn't have something to laugh at them for, but then someone would be yelling about them wasting all that extra money.

edit on 9-10-2013 by Evil_Santa because: (no reason given)

I could've set up a site around the 'typical' "LAMP"- Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP... or even DotNetNuke or similar ASPNET / SQL solution and had better results than they've had.

If the site's database is being hammered, as you allude, the DB engine should be rolling back transactions instead of committing them, and the site's login should be dealing with that in commensurate fashion.

This is a tech / IT failure of comical proportions, brought to you full face with tar and feathers courtesy of the Democrat mules.

That's nifty that you think that an Open-Source CMS system could handle millions of hits, with complex data analytical processes, but no. The entire reason why they're having issues is outlined in the article if you bothered to read it instead of following the parade of "lol they suck".

Federal IT projects are infamous for blowing out the "iron triangle" of project management—cost, scope, and schedule. Healthcare.gov hits all three sides of the triangle. Because of the legislative mandate for Healthcare.gov and its state-run cohorts, the project was handed a massive scope. With Congress eager to cut its throat, the program has been highly budget-sensitive. And with a hard deadline of October 1 and a heavy up-front regulatory process required to create the specifications for the portal, three years was a very tight deadline.

In June, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan auditing body that provides oversight reports to Congress, said that it was still a crapshoot as to whether the system would work on time. This uncertainty persisted because the hub being built by QSSI still hadn't been completely tested (the hub is responsible for making automated decisions about eligibility). While the policies to govern how the hub works—and how various state systems were supposed to work—had been completed, there was still a lot of code to be written to make those policies into an actual system.

All of that pushed the development of the system closer and closer to the deadline. As one reddit user posted when the site ran into trouble on October 1, "My wife works on this project but not as a developer. Last night she said, 'I have no idea how the site is going to go live tomorrow.'"

Once you get through all that, it’s not clear that it's going to do you any good. Underlying problems in the back-end code—including the data hub built by QSSI—have been causing errors in determining whether individuals are eligible for subsidized plans under the program.

Yup, called it on the first reply. See the bolded sections.

reply to post by Evil_Santa


Needless to say, no matter their excuses, it's been a big fat failure.
The failure is not only in the website, how about that up until the 1st, most people did not realize its costs or limitations? Possibly because the facts are not enticing to anyone but the uninsurable, and so they were purposely kept quiet( or did the govt not know the prices and limits until the last minute?) either way, the people are feeling tricked.

reply to post by xuenchen


Geez epic fail is right. I'd have been happy to build their miserable site for them for half the cost. Say $35-$45 million. I thought these guys were supposed to be the most tech savvy administration in history?? Guess not, and now they're calling the Canadians for help.

I find this hilarious considering they sell themselves as 'educated' and the most 'tech savy' group in this country.

And they can't even use their own website!!!

That is priceless.

neo96
I find this hilarious considering they sell themselves as 'educated' and the most 'tech savy' group in this country.

And they can't even use their own website!!!

That is priceless.

Like they say,

It's *Always* the most educated and professional ones that cause the biggest boondoggles.

Makes ya wonder eh?

First let me say that I like some of what Obamacare is about. Pre-existing condition coverage is a big winner in my book. But there are few things that annoy me more than utter incompetence.

I was trying to determine what might be an appropriate phrase to describe the sheer magnitude of the failure. So I put together a few choice descriptions offered by some of the earlier posters:

"Complete F-A-I-L"
"disastrous technological failures"
"This is a tech / IT failure of comical proportions"
"Geez epic fail is right.""
"I find this hilarious"

So how about this: An epic disastrous technological F-A-I-L-U-R-E of completely hilarious proportions.

When I read the Ars technica article, I didn't know whether to laugh at these poor slobs, or sit down and cry with them.

Overall I felt the article was written by an apologist who provided a rather thoughtful series of excuses for this gargantuan failure. However, he also provided a nice description of some of the better examples of the contractor's and the government's utter incompetence:

The result of the headlong rush to October 1 was a system that had never been tested at anything like the load it experienced on its first day of operation (if it was tested with loads at all). Those looking for a reason for the site's horrible performance on its first day had plenty of things to choose from.

A few years ago, I used to build in-house performance testing systems. I pushed databases and business process management systems to their maximum load. Then I used that data to create documents detailing loading and performance characteristics for several different classes of server and database configurations.

I would get final releases of software that were being approved by QA that would fly apart at the seams with the least load. But product had to ship by the end of the quarter so the company could make their guidance for Wall Street. Quality scrificed in pursuit of the artificial deadline.

It was a common inside joke that any customer that was crazy enough to go live with that version of the program was in for a wild ride. A month or so later I would get a workable version of the program that could actually stand up to the load.

Now in the case of the Obamacare website, the developers made the artificial deadline of October 1st. Just like my old company made the end-of-the-quarter deadline. But the product was beta quality at best, and certainly not ready for deployment.

First of all, there's the front-end site itself. The first page of the registration process (once you get to it) has 2,099 lines of HTML code, but it also calls 56 JavaScript files and 11 CSS files. That's not exactly optimal for heavy-load pages.

YOU THINK?!?!

For a fully operational system that's an obscene amount of (probably)redundant data to transfer. But this would be acceptable for a beta-test product. However under load it ties up network bandwidth, server time, and disk throughput. And remember, all of this code has to be processed by the client's browser. So, now this bloat of a system is also churning cycles on every one of the applicant's computer systems. This epic fail actually started the instant the applicant selected the link to the government website. At that point, the failure had already started to seep into the applicant's computer, like a piece of viscious malware.

Navigating the site once you get past registration is something of a cheese chase through the rat-maze. "It's like a bad, boring video game where you try to grunt and hack your way through to the next step," one site user told Ars.

Okay, there's no excuse for a poorly designed "user experience." There are engineers whose speciality and whole career are based on designing user-friendly interfaces. Not to mention the fact that this should have been done in the early design phase.

Once you get through all that, it’s not clear that it's going to do you any good. Underlying problems in the back-end code—including the data hub built by QSSI—have been causing errors in determining whether individuals are eligible for subsidized plans under the program.

Here is some more information about the data hub built by QSSI:

In June, the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan auditing body that provides oversight reports to Congress, said that it was still a crapshoot as to whether the system would work on time. This uncertainty persisted because the hub being built by QSSI still hadn't been completely tested (the hub is responsible for making automated decisions about eligibility). While the policies to govern how the hub works—and how various state systems were supposed to work—had been completed, there was still a lot of code to be written to make those policies into an actual system.

So, less that 4 months before the system goes live, and they're still writing some of the trickiest code in the whole project! If the project manager for this fiasco worked for Darth Vader, he would have had some trouble breathing come October 1st.

Even without knowing all of the specific details of how this project came together, I can discern enough to see that this whole thing has a very amateurish feel to it. It kind of reminds me of some code that a bunch of undergraduates would build for a class project.

This project failed along so many different paths in so many different dimensions that something occured to me: The probability of achieving an epic failure of this magnitude has to be almost as low as the probability of pulling off a perfect implementation without any hitches at all. So that leads me to one conclusion: It was sabotage.



Dex