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How Linux Saved A Fast Food Giant.
- whalesalad 17y agoI wonder why these die hard Windows fans stick with it when they realize what kind of things you can do with Linux.
- noonespecial 17y agoI wonder about the mindset that allows one to accept running MacAfee on a freakin' Point of Sale device is something that just has to be done?!
- andrewf 17y agoIf credit card data is going to pass through the device, anti-virus software is mandated by PCI-DSS.
- Raphael_Amiard 17y agoIt's still wrong. Anti virus software in general are not very far from virii themselves in what they do to your computer. This whole macafee story just proves the point, but it's not the first time such a thing happens. AVG had that happen to them too a year back.
- noonespecial 17y agoHmmm interestingly, the "unix exemption" seems to have been dropped from 1.1 to 1.2 of DSS document. Part 5.1 used to include this note: Note: Systems commonly affected by viruses typically do not include UNIX based operating systems or mainframes. Consumer grade MacAfee that auto updates is still probably a very poor choice for this application as they should have a test bed in the lab that they beta all changes on before they roll out to thousands of machines that likely need a truck roll if something goes wrong.
- count 17y agoYou can run McAfee on linux now as well (mostly for scanning email and CIFS shared files, I assume?). PCI DSS and DoD IA controls require it. Enterprise grade McAfee still sucks, it's just a more manageable suck. Despite that, it still blew up with the bad DAT file - those are the same between product lines.
- dalore 17y agoThe WTF here is that anti-virus software is mandated by PCI-DSS and not procedures that stop virii in the first place.
- Luyt 17y ago> If credit card data is going to pass through the device, anti-virus software is mandated by PCI-DSS. Even when the POS is not running Windows? Or does the PCI-DSS assume all computers are running Windows?
- noonespecial 17y agoIts a perfect example of the classic "if it can then it must" brainless rule application. I once had a car that had a bad bulb socket in the "cyclops" brake light so it wouldn't pass inspection. Did I fix the socket to get past? Hell no. I removed the whole light. If it wasn't there, it didn't have to work. Those were the rules.
- blub 17y agoIt doesn't have to be done. I've worked on POS and smart-weighing systems that were cross-platform (Windows and Linux). Neither used AV, but they were tightly locked down. My impression was that most customers don't care about the OS. Some prefer Windows, they already have the tech personnel in place. On the other hand, the Linux ports were done because a very big customer said that they had to have Linux... It certainly cost them more than licensing Windows. :) From a dev point of view, Windows was easier, as it is generally more friendly towards C++ development. The OSes were about equally capable, I didn't see any Linux technical advantages in practice.
- michaelfairley 17y agoReminds me of http://xkcd.com/463/ http://xkcd.com/463/
- Legion 17y agoExcept now, the condom isn't just pointless, but it's an active threat in itself. You might even say it's... a trojan. groans
- gaius 17y agoThe guy was just as impressed with his Windows colleague's skills.
- sid0 17y agoWho sticks with what, where? Windows and Linux both have their uses. I use Windows because in my opinion Visual Studio is the best native code debugger ever created. I'm hardly a fanboy though, and I use Linux a lot (valgrind is awesome).
- stevenwei 17y agoAs I noted on his blog, it is rather unfortunate that there aren't more Linux based point of sale systems out there. I guess point of sale software is considered 'enterprisey' enough to warrant vendors wanting to run Windows and SQL Server for 'support' reasons.
- hn_aml 17y agoMaybe it's to do with the lack of working drivers for most ticket printers in Linux.
- stevenwei 16y agoNot really sure how accurate that is....most ticket printers, magnetic card readers, weigh scales, barcode scanners, and other POS related devices adhere to the Unified POS standard. There is a Java implementation of the standard (called, unsurprisingly, JavaPOS) as well as a .NET implementation (called POS for .NET). I've run a Linux based point of sale that used JavaPOS to interface with peripherals without issue.
- andrewf 17y agoLots of vendors are also MS resellers and will turn a profit by selling their client all the Windows and SQL Server licenses they'll need to run the provided solution.
- kprobst 17y agoDid the "use the right tool for the job" message in the article go over your head?
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoPXE is radsauce, it is netboot for the 21st century
- Andys 17y agoBooting off iSCSI is all the rage now. Any server with an Intel 1Gbe network port can be made to boot off iSCSI after flashing with special firmware from Intel.
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoWoah, that is cool! I should hang out with more SysAdmins.
- dlnovell 17y ago+1 for "radsauce"
- shadowsun7 17y ago> After cleaning up the processes and adding several easter eggs, it was time to pilot it at 10 local restaurants. I admire his sense of humour. Easter eggs in the face of calamity indeed.
- eru 17y agoI guess he had a bit of downtime, when he had to work for other people.
- kaptain 17y agoAt first I wasn't sure if this was a rant against Windows because the author kept using POS. Then I realized that POS also meant point-of-sale.
- eru 17y agoWhat does POS mean besides point-of-sale?
- infinite8s 17y agopiece of shit
- wendroid 17y agoTRWTF is that they didn't prepare for a catastophic failure such as this one. If you have your POS getting auto-updates then why haven't you considered the possibility that it will go wrong with "WILL NOT BOOT" as a consequence. It should simply be a matter of phoning the manager and tell him : "Don't worry, just insert the disk that says "RESCUE DISK" on it, reboot and it will roll back the machine to last week".
- noonespecial 17y agoSince we know that the machines could PXE boot, they should have just had a server in the back preloaded with a known good image that would clone onto the POS automatically if started via PXE. Then the fix would have been a matter of simply swapping the dhcp entry for the pos devices on the server with one that had the pxe directive. The pos would have caught that during its next reboot and restored itself.
- kogir 17y agoThe real issue here has nothing to do with Linux or Windows. Rolling out updates to production without testing them first is a fail, not matter what OS you're using. If they'd tested the McAfee definitions on even one of the POS terminals before rolling them out to all the restaurants everything would have been fine. They could have even automated having one restaurant get the definitions one or two days before all the others so only a single location was affected. Or better, set up staggered updates within each restaurant, so they all stay up and at worst lose a single POS terminal.
- joss82 17y agoMaybe they saw a virus infection spread so fast before that they must deploy the update ASAP? I doubt it though.
- senki 17y agoYou are right, but it was McAfee's fault, they messed up the testing in the very first hand. You can't test everything yourself, this update was a paid service of a major IT company.
- bad_user 17y ago> Rolling out updates to production without testing them first is a fail Deploying McAfee in the first place to all those terminals is a painful process by itself, yet many people do it because of the "extra" security it provides. When you can't trust something like McAfee for your production, then you're doing something wrong, and that's not the lack of testing upgrades to McAfee ;) IMHO, the WTF here is that they've used Windows in the first place for what are in essence dumb terminals that help them manage drive-through orders ... for that you can always deploy a highly customized and minimal Linux OS, with most of the ports blocked and with a minimal number of services running, with reduced capabilities and enhanced with Linux SE if you're a security freak ... making the area of attack for any potential threat a lot smaller. Then you wouldn't need a piece of shit like McAfee to handle your security ... all anti-viruses lately are pieces of shit IMHO. > The real issue here has nothing to do with Linux or Windows I think it does. On that terminal they could've had a small Linux image providing a ssh server, whose purpose would be to boot into it in cases of emergency. And you can control a Linux instance a lot more efficiently remotely. Try doing that with Windows.
- cstuder 17y agoThe most interesting line was this: > If I had not flirted with Linux during college, where would we be right now? I wonder how much in support just relies on good luck. Someone happily trying out stuff several years back on his own. Curiosity saved the system.
- a2tech 17y agoFrom my time working at McDonalds back in highschool I can tell you they had solved this problem already. The head machine in the back office was running AIX, and all the POS terminals netbooted a linux variant from it. There was also a secondary server which no one touched that did the most critical job of receiving, tracking and reporting orders. Windows on a dumb POS terminal? That just sounds like a straight up bad idea to me.
- count 17y agoHow long ago was that? In 1999/2000 they were running everything off of a MSDOS app on a Win95 desktop PC...
- hoggle 17y agoI think there is still a huge install base of Windows machines in POS environments, especially in small to medium businesses. In most of those settings (read: no need for remote access) it is per se not worse than deploying Linux unless you have them connected to an open LAN/WLAN and/or the Internet. It sure made sense for a lot of people during the last 15 years for various reasons, occasionally one can even spot a DOS system still being used (now you know why they still sell floppy disks in 2010). Big companies like McDonalds clearly had the resources long ago to go for a different approach but only during the last 5 years or so this has become a more viable option for many small-medium shops. Even though Ubuntu, Google, Wikipedia & Co have "happened" during those Windows POS years we aren't there yet. I suspect mainstream small-medium business will skip this step anyhow: For example I myself am working on a distributed POS solution using a certain set of 2010 state of the art technology (the no-brainer variation: "cloud" back end and administration, newest generation of touch devices as "terminals"). It allows for low on site IT infrastructure and maintenance plus a strong emphasize on UI/UX which thanks to Apple is finally becoming ubiquitously expected.
- hoggle 17y agoGrml is another Debian based Linux distro for rescue scenarios like this. The small version weighs in a little more at 100MB versus PLoP's 62MB though. If your deployment environment doesn't offer NFS/SMB/CIFS you can fetch your images via HTTP from your PXE booted kernel too. Regarding data centers - it can even boot over serial in connection with HP iLO and IBM RSA/AMM out of the box. http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=rescue http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=rescue http://grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-small-2010.04/ http://grml.org/changelogs/README-grml-small-2010.04/ PLoP seems to be a great tool for similar cases, interestingly both are Austrian distributions: http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux.html#pxel http://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux.html#pxel I've got a grml usb stick with me at all times (now even supports multiboot 32/64bit!). I just recently recovered a relatives' WinXP after a seemingly failed automatic update and did a dll rollback in a couple of minutes. It's a great tool plus it shows you how to use the mighty zsh properly!
- qjz 17y agoTiny Core Linux is another candidate at only 10MB (or its X-less variant, Micro Core, at 6MB). It includes a capable terminal server for PXE booting with support for loading extensions via NFS/TFTP/HTTP: http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Netbooting http://wiki.tinycorelinux.com/tiki-index.php?page=Netbooting It's well documented and easily customized: http://www.tinycorelinux.com/ http://www.tinycorelinux.com/
- hoggle 17y agoI love busybox really makes sense in regards to size, thanks man!
- yosho 17y agoI'm guessing POS means Point of Service but every time I read it, I think "Piece of Shit" terminal, which I suppose is applicable as well.
- kjhgfghjk 17y agoYou have a terminal with no keyboard, no webbrowser and no (or heavily firewalled) network connection. WHY do you need a anti-virus? It's not like the user is going to be downloading apps from some dodgy porn site or opening word docs from a spammer.
- patrickk 17y agoA previous hotel job I had used a touchscreen Windows-based POS. One day, for whatever reason, I accidentally held down the 'submit transaction' button for half a second too long. The terminal went apeshit and crashed. Several hours later, after hours of phone calls, hundreds of orders written on paper and totted up by calculator, a confused-looking technician managed to get it working properly again. What a mess that was.