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Driver’s licensing, vehicle registration resume after computer snafu

Gordon Y.K. Pang
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CINDY ELLEN RUSSELL / CRUSSELL@STARADVERTISER.COM

Mayor Kirk Caldwell held a press conference with city officials at the data center located in the Frank F. Fasi Municipal Building on Wednesday. All of the city’s driver licensing and other customer service operations are back to normal this morning after in-house and contractor technicians were able to make necessary fixes overnight to a days-long computer problem, a city spokesman said.

All of the city’s driver licensing and other customer service operations are back to normal this morning after in-house and contractor technicians were able to make necessary fixes overnight to a days-long computer problem.

All terminals at each of the driver licensing centers at Kapalama Hale, Kapolei Hale, Waianae, Wahiawa and Koolau were tested this morning and were found to be working normally and at regular speeds, city spokesman Andrew Pereira said.

Customers arriving at the licensing centers were being serviced at a regular pace this morning, he said.

City officials contacted their counterparts in Hawaii, Maui and Kauai counties and confirmed that their operations are also back to normal, he said.

The glitches to the city’s mainframe computer network, which technicians began noticing Monday, all but crippled the ability of Honolulu and the other three counties to process customer transactions including driver licensing and vehicle registration. The city blamed unexpected incompatibility between new hardware and old software as the root of the problem.

Mayor Kirk Caldwell, in a statement, said: “With the help of our vendors and our hard-working city staff, we found a configuration problem in the system that impeded the activity of the security software. After correcting the configuration, the security software worked and the performance of the system returned to normal. I want to thank all the residents of Oahu and those on the neighbor islands for their patience as we work on this issue over the last few days.”

Pereira said Department of Information Technology fixed the problem following a five-hour conference call, involving technicians from as far as Bulgaria and Paris, from about 7 p.m. to midnight. After that, “they completed the fix and got the system back online,” he said.

The city will proceed with an earlier plan to open up the driver licensing center at Kapalama Hale from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday to deal with a backlog of driver licensing renewals, Pereira said. No other transactions, including road testing, will be conducted.

City officials said data processing slowed to a crawl, but never actually stopped, during the week.

On Wednesday, Caldwell warned that the system may not be fully operational until Friday.

Correction: A previous version of this story said the city blamed the unexpected incompatibility between new hardware and new software as the root of the problem. It should have said old software.
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