Total outage at NID haus

There has been a system shutdown at the National Identification office after it lost capacity to register data for NID cards last week Wednesday.

Acting Registrar General, Noel Mobiha, today explained the glitch in the system.

He said the outage is due to an overload of the system, causing a shutdown since last week.

“We lost the capability to have our staff here register onto the main body now, getting through the window to getting some work for the registrations,” Mobiha said.

Power outage is also believed to be the reason behind the glitch.

“Our registration numbers went beyond what was known for the systems.”

In December last year the printing system also collapsed, and Minister for National Planning and Monitoring, Richard Maru, has instructed Mobiha to source new printers.

“It’s a tree with many branches. So what happened last year in late December, we lost the connectivity to the printing system for the NID card. We’ve been working on it since, trying to get it up.

“So it's probably two issues; the system itself - the platform we operate in, and also the glitches and the machine not shutting down properly.

“Glitches come from many things, PNG Power outage may be one, glitches can come on when major loads go off the grid, it cause glitches on the systems and they run, they do damage things.

“But we’ve got genset setting, sitting on both sides, we got the national data centre in Telikom Rumana,” the acting Registrar General said.

Alternative arrangements have been in place for the printing of birth certificates, with the assistance of Immigration.

“So since last week and now we are working with Immigration to try and find out how we can fast-track the certificates without the system, so the police team is with Immigrations now to find that way to address the issues of quick certificates, for the children going to school, under 18, and for those over age, we are looking at a default arrangement that Immigrations is happy with it,” Mobiha added.

The office is looking at immediately securing a specialist from the system supplier because they have no access to the source code, while mobile kits are being used to register data.

Author: 
Sally Pokiton