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i work for a diesel truck maintenance and repair shop and its been hell on earth this morning. - our IT wizard says the fixes wont work on lathes/CNC systems.
by nimbius 2y ago
i work for a diesel truck maintenance and repair shop and its been hell on earth this morning.
- our IT wizard says the fixes wont work on lathes/CNC systems. we may need to ship the controllers back to the manufacturer in Wisconsin.
- AC is still not running. sent the apprentice to get fans from the shop floor.
- building security alarms are still blaring, need to get a ladder to clip the horns and sirens on the outside of the building. still cant disarm anything.
- still no phones. IT guy has set up two "emergency" phones...one is a literal rotary phone. stresses we still cannot call 911 or other offices. fire sprinklers will work, but no fire department will respond.
- no email, no accounting, nothing. I am going to the bank after this to pick up cash so i can make payday for 14 shop technicians. was warned the bank likely would either not have enough, or would not be able to process the account (if they open at all today.)
- AzzyHN 2y agoWhy are these things running Windows!?
- adastra22 2y agoAlmost every system you interact with in the world has some critical thing in its innards running windows.
- lapink 2y agoMost stuff is fine in France.
- slenk 2y agoNot according to Air France. https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/air-france-flights-and-french-tv-disrupted-in-major-microsoft-bug/669898 https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/air-france-flights-and-...
- dboreham 2y agoNo Crowdstrike salespeople in France?
- rvnx 2y agoWe are using OpenOffice as firewall https://www.numerama.com/politique/12508-albanel-le-ministere-de-la-culture-a-comme-pare-feu-open-office-maj.html https://www.numerama.com/politique/12508-albanel-le-minister...
- jordanb 2y agoI like the idea that technology is so unreliable in star trek because the computers are all centuries of software accretion with Windows way down the stack somewhere.
- adastra22 2y agoThe late great Vernor Vinge explored this in A Fire Upon The Deep. One of the characters is/was in a former life a programmer-archeologist. The idea being that so many thousands of years in the future every relevant program has already been written, so his job was to comb the archives for the right mix of codes and integrate them, rather than right something new.
- Freak_NL 2y ago“So we've got this CNC controller written in Rust from 2036, and, ah, here is a GUI for something like that written in late 90's Visual Basic 6… Just combine those and…” “So uhm, you do know what you are doing, right?” “Sir! I am a programmer-acheologist! Oh this is fascinating… Hold on, I must unearth and preserve this beauty of a BAT-file before we can go any further.”
- pphysch 2y agoMore specifically why are they running extra endpoint management software that receives automatic updates from the Internet... This is basically the IoT apocalypse scenario (AC is down??) but ironically not affecting many IoT devices, I assume.
- Redoubts 2y agoA lot of industrial machinery is just $x00,000 of equipment strapped to a windows pc. Hell, a lot of it is strapped to a version long EOL
- porkbeer 2y agoCan confirm this is the norm in machine shops. I encounter systems running dos, 3.1, 95, 2k and mostly XP constantly. I rather prefer the old dos systems of the obsolete stuff. Less variables. It is easier and more reliable to freeze the tech in time than it is to manage updates.
- anon_cow1111 2y agoMy last CNC job was just a 98 pc that dropped into dos to load programs, this must have been right around when win10 came out. Sneakernet and floppies made it secure enough, but the main network where all the orders were handled was... terminal based.
- poopsmithe 2y agoOS is irrelevant in this case, and CrowdStrike deserves all the blame. They literally brought down Linux systems earlier this year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41005936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41005936
- seba_dos1 2y agoIt's still a valid question, just not directly related to the crashes.
- Rinzler89 2y agoBecause almost everything industrial runs windows because that's what the devs of those companies were most familiar with since MS-DOS days and evolved organically over time to modern versions of Windows due to great backwards compatibility and platform familiarity.
- consteval 2y agoRight but typically embedded systems run Linux, because while Windows has great compatibility on x86 it's virtually worthless outside of that.
- Rinzler89 2y agoThose aren't embedded systems though, but mini PC computers. And embedded systems often run bare metal C code, not always Linux, especially for spindle/servo control where they get their commands from that PC.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- acedTrex 2y agoThe automation world runs on windows
- surfingdino 2y agoBecause Microsoft is giving away licenses to unis, esp in developing countries. IT jobs are seen there as a way to earn a good living and you get hordes of people who know nothing but Windows. That's how you get into the situation where most of the toolchains for embedded systems run on Windows, software for embedded systems is written on and for Windows, and so on. And then, one botched update fucks up everything.
- delta_p_delta_x 2y agoThere are a lot of things running Windows because it's pretty straightforward to write a user-mode driver to interact with custom hardware compared to Linux, where every driver needs to be in the kernel and built with the kernel. Yes, there's DKMS, but it's still more of a faff than the relatively plug-and-play mechanism that Windows offers, especially since Vista.
- rolph 2y agoprops to your IT guy for setting up in house phones. I believe these should be kept and expanded upon.
- thepasswordis 2y agoYour IT wizard is probably wrong. There is a fix that involves booting into safe mode and deleting a file. Unless you have an encrypted file system this should be a relatively trivial fix.
- rahkiin 2y agoCNCs might not allow direct Windows access for end-users and require on-premise support from the manufacturer. Our cnc can be remotely serviced… if Windows boots.
- thepasswordis 2y agoIf you’ve got physical access to the machine it’s your machine. All you need is a USB port. I’d expect that the manufacturer puts out their own fix which basically copies crowdstrikes suggestion. I’d even suspect it by the end of the day today. The fix is really simple, and luckily also very simple to automate. It’s going to be a lot of running around for IT staff (if deputized helpers!) but this should all be over by the weekend.
- kichimi 2y agoNo it really is not. If you have a service contract, you do not touch it.
- rahkiin 2y agoNobody is going to try physically tampering with the HMI attached to their 50k$+ machine when you have a support contract indeed
- freedomben 2y ago> If you’ve got physical access to the machine it’s your machine. All you need is a USB port. You're a few years out of date here. Physical access is not the end like it used to be. We live in an era of hardware-backed anti-tamper and signed loaders/kernels. If you have a way around it, I suggest you start reaching out these companies because you could make a lot of money.
- a0123 2y agoFeels like there is some sort of lesson we should learn as a society.
- curious_cat_163 2y agoNot trust Microsoft to be the operating system of the modern life?
- surfingdino 2y agoYes, monocultures are disasters in the making.
- dan_quixote 2y ago> our IT wizard says the fixes wont work on lathes/CNC systems Why, whY, WHY...are these things connected to the internet?!
- foobarian 2y agoAnd why are they running windows? And why are they running Crowdstrike? WTF
- consp 2y agoIf they are offline it should not matter which OS they run, maybe a RTOS for the control software but anything goes for the ux. If they are online, well...
- MangoCoffee 2y agoNot sure what the OS has to do with CrowdStrike's fuckup. CrowdStrike also runs on Linux and macOS.
- sameerds 2y agoIt's probably the remote computer that's running Windows and currently affected by Crowdstrike.
- 2y ago