Home Affairs can render some services when "the system is offline"

Daniel Puchert

Daniel Puchert

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Big Home Affairs system offline lie

Contrary to popular belief, the online system used by Department of Home Affairs (DHA) offices across South Africa can at least function partially — even during periods of downtime.

That suggests that the notorious "system is offline" issue many people are greeted with when visiting a DHA branch might be blown out of proportion and used as an excuse when it is not relevant.
 
Daniel Puchert said:
Big Home Affairs system offline lie

Contrary to popular belief, the online system used by Department of Home Affairs (DHA) offices across South Africa can at least function partially — even during periods of downtime.

That suggests that the notorious "system is offline" issue many people are greeted with when visiting a DHA branch might be blown out of proportion and used as an excuse when it is not relevant.
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No, you mean the officials are lazy fscks? Who would ever have guessed.
 
I've been saying this for years...

The system was built with offline capability when it was released back in 2013 or whenever.
 
Yeah good luck telling the lazy home affairs worker that they can still continue to work even if the system is offline. We all know how that conversation will go.
 
The 'system syncs' when the connection returns, is all fine and dandy, but most of the delay during my last visit was the delay in the employee trying to sign into the system. I was first in line and the system just hanged on login (failing to verify his credentials with the back-end server). Is a regular occurance so early in the morning as per the dude that was helping me.
 
"The system is offline" lie is particularly funny when you walk between departments in different buildings, where magically the system is online :ROFL:
Doesn't help to raise the issue though - rot from the top.
 
ld13 said:
The 'system syncs' when the connection returns, is all fine and dandy, but most of the delay during my last visit was the delay in the employee trying to sign into the system. I was first in line and the system just hanged on login (failing to verify his credentials with the back-end server). Is a regular occurance so early in the morning as per the dude that was helping me.
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Well when you have a 1 or 2mbit link from the dark ages servicing the whole building, Im not surprised
 
Modern, resilient and redundant systems reduce the number of humans required to operate it.

I reckon Government systems are by design fragile and inefficient as it keeps a gigantic amount of people employed.
 
ld13 said:
The 'system syncs' when the connection returns, is all fine and dandy, but most of the delay during my last visit was the delay in the employee trying to sign into the system. I was first in line and the system just hanged on login (failing to verify his credentials with the back-end server). Is a regular occurance so early in the morning as per the dude that was helping me.
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It also amused me when I last did it, the number of times the official is required to "verify" themselves with a finger print was just retarded.
 
It is unclear why the DHA would allow for offline collections of passports but not ID cards.
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It's pretty simple. The ID card contains a chip that is encoded with your biometrics, however they only encode it when you actually come to physically collect it. If the system is offline then they can't encode it. South African passports currently do not contain any biometric chip in them which is why they can be collected offline.
 
The one time I had the system offline issue was when collecting my ID or Passport can't remember and it was a legitimated timeout I could see for myself on the screen.

The part that makes it worse I think is the biometric authentication they seemingly need to do every step of the way and that ****s out phone home and then it starts all over again.

If it could just authenticate and the start and end and then save in between it would already solve most of this kak I suspect, the constant data stream is likely what's murdering the system.

You wouldn't need more than the 2MBit link if the underlying system was designed better.
 
Primary fibre line at R5k
Mikrotik router with connection failover configured (R3-4k once off)
Uncapped LTE backup connection. (R1k pm)
that's R6-7K per month per branch

All traffic running to central redundant VPN server to connect to systems infrastructure and internet breakout. R25k per month for hosting and redundant breakout bandwidth.

Its not freaking difficult to do high availability wide area networks these days.

SITA is just incompetent.
 
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deweyzeph said:
It's pretty simple. The ID card contains a chip that is encoded with your biometrics, however they only encode it when you actually come to physically collect it. If the system is offline then they can't encode it. South African passports currently do not contain any biometric chip in them which is why they can be collected offline.
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Half off-topic but yeah, Linkedin insists on verifying me with Persona which requires an NFC passport (which as you pointed out, does not exist)

Any idea how are other SA peeps verifying their profile?
 
Sapphiron said:
Primary fibre line at R5k
Mikrotik router with connection failover configured (R3-4k once off)
Uncapped LTE backup connection. (R1k pm)
that's R6-7K per month per branch

All traffic running to central redundant VPN server to connect to systems infrastructure and internet breakout. R25k per month for hosting and redundant breakout bandwidth.

Its not freaking difficult to do high availability wide area networks these days.

SITA is just incompetent.
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I do that for 10% of your price and still make a profit.

Don't pay for "enterprise SLAs" if you are using multiple redundancies. The sum of 5 cheapies is far greater in reliability terms than using 2 enterprise lines, but exponentially cheaper.
 
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