Last week, several news channels reported on the strongest solar storm since 2005. This news item reminded me of a peculiar support ticket we received one gray Monday morning a few years ago, when I was still writing software for fire departments.

# Ticket 7238  
Subject: **AVL broken**  
Status: New  
Description  
06:22 Vehicles stay mostly stationary on the map, even when we are  
positive they are en route.  

Fire departments that have to cover a large area - and are wealthy enough - often use AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location) to track their vehicles and visualize them on a map. This is extremely valuable, because you always want to dispatch the vehicles with the smallest response time to a high priority intervention. Also being able to advise drivers of possible blockages and toxic gas clouds can save lives. To be able to track a vehicle, an AVL module is installed into each vehicle’s cockpit. This module uses GPS to determine the location and sends the location data over GPRS to a central server.

On our end, we had a third party service listening for those location packets and translating them into a more understandable format. This service, not being mission critical, wasn’t being monitored, so we had to look into the logs to see what was going on. Scrolling through megabytes of debug logs, we couldn’t find anything suspicious.

While I was investigating this, a co-worker had come in and was reading through his mails while sipping on his morning coffee. After reading support ticket 7238, he nonchalantly said he knew what was going on with AVL and he would take over from there.

# Ticket 7238  
Subject: AVL broken  
Status: Pending  
Description  
**08:45 I heard on the radio that there is a solar storm going on at  
the moment, which affects sattelites. The AVL module might have  
a hard time getting a GPS fix. This issue should solve itself over  
time. We will keep an eye on this issue.**  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
06:22 Vehicles stay mostly stationary on the map, even when we are  
positive they are en route.  

A few days passed and although the solar storm was over, we were still seeing signifcant packet loss. After spending a few hours working the ticket, in which we restarted the service, monitored network traffic on the machine and conctacted the telephony provider, we were getting a bit desperate. We were discussing other potential paths to investigate, when one of our more seasoned co-workers asked “You guys did try restarting the server, right?".

Good enough, after restarting the server, we were seeing no more packet loss and the vehicles started moving on the map again.

# Ticket 7238  
Subject: AVL broken  
**Status: Resolved**  
Description  
**15:47 The solar storm must be over. The vehicle locations are  
being updated in a timely fashion again.**  
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
08:45 I heard on the radio that there is a solar storm going on at  
the moment, which affects sattelites. The AVL module might have  
a hard time getting a GPS fix. This issue should solve itself over  
time. We will keep an eye on this issue.  
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
06:22 Vehicles stay mostly stationary on the map, even when we are  
positive they are en route.  

Until today, we never talked about ticket 7238 again.