The dangers of relying on external infrastructure

The dangers of relying on external infrastructure

This week I was working with TrakHound’s MTConnect.NET library again, but all my test connections were failing.

I had been testing against the MTConnect Institute’s demo agent, which is now run by NIST. I opened it in my browser and got a 404 Not Found. So I went up one level and saw this…

“Due to the fact that the federal government is currently shut down, the website smstestbed.nist.gov will be unavailable until further notice…”

Yep, the agent run by NIST is shut down due to the federal government shutdown.

Fortunately it’s pretty easy to download and install the C++ agent. There are even instructions for installing on Ubuntu or Raspberry Pi, and prebuilt Windows executables.

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