Older FCC application exhibits unavailable

[bigic]

Has anybody noticed that exhibits of older applications on the FCC website can't be accessed? When I try to open the exhibits, I'm getting an error message instead.

 

[cc333]

This could be related to that big CrowdStrike outage last Friday, but I'm not sure.

c

 

[bigic]

I don't think it's CrowdStrike - there was a problem even before that.
@Michi might be of interest

 

[K.M. Richards]

I don't remember what the announced timeline was, but I seem to recall the FCC planning to integrate the old CDBS database into LMS. This may be a side effect of that process.

 

[Michi]

It appears that many of the imported items from CDBS have already been copied over to LMS. These were the items that were found in CDBS under the "Correspondence Folder". Those that are copied over at the facility level can be found on the LMS Facility Search section. I do notice that the history cards did find their way over. Other documents (such as past decisions, etc.) may have not made it over. Some of those may be available through EDOCS, especially if they were a published decision that made it to the FCC Record. Letters from applicants may have been lost in the transition. Over the years, REC had performed "mass run" projects that would scan each CDBS facility to look for new import letters. The latest item I do immediately see that is in our shop is from June 17, 2022. REC does have a lot of these "import letters" from CDBS in our archives either in converted PDF to text (which sometimes gives wonky results) or the pure PDFs themselves. We simply do not have the online storage space right now to house them all to make them available online. When a project like this comes up on the priority list and a reasonable cloud storage solution can be found, we may be able to publish what we have through the FCCdata.org user interface.

One of the primary goals of the CDBS capture projects was to assure that the history card PDFs were secured after a day when CDBS is shut down, but it does appear that the FCC is attempting to preserve them in LMS.

These mass run projects did NOT capture exhibits from applications. While we did have a small amount of application parsing from CDBS, we did not really get into parsing applications until the development of eLMS a few years ago and that parsing was limited to LMS applications. eLMS does capture the existence of application exhibits and we capture the LMS document IDs for those exhibits so we can link to them on the FCC LMS server. We are not downloading the exhibits themselves.

CDBS era applications, especially those that are still active records have been copied over to LMS, including many of the exhibits. You will have to go into the LMS Application Search to find those.

 

[Michi]

Overall, the CDBS server has been hit or miss. Since it is not really "mission critical" like it used to be, it's very low on the totem pole for any kind of maintenance. It comes from around the same era as ULS and as some may recall, ULS recently had a massive multi-day outage within the past year. From a raw data perspective, CDBS was much easier to deal with vs. LMS, however, LMS is more robust.. however, some data is missing from the raw dump file and that's one of the main reasons why we designed eLMS. eLMS is the reason why when you file an FM engineering application in LMS, it shows up on FCCdata.org within about 30 minutes of filing instead of waiting until the next day. While eLMS currently does not capture the details from AM or TV engineering applications, we are capturing full application data from non-engineering applications in all services.

eLMS: Enhanced LMS | REC Networks

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