[RANT] BSOD on cash machines

[Jeros]

Oh FFS

Friend of mine has lost her card thanks to a BSODing cash machine.

Why the hell are these things running on windows? Its utterly moronic that company's can run there servers on unix but yet run windows on something as important as a cash machine.

And another thing, anyone else getting annoyed when you are looking at something like say a timetable for bus/trains or some info screen and you cant see some of it cos of a windows pop up message saying "blah blah error" or "you need to reset windows to finish updating" etc

grrr

/rant off

 

[Ctuchik]

had that happen once to. fuck all the bank can do other then to block the card and ordering a new one.

also seen one with a "error" message saying that "this windows product needs to be activated"...

 

[old.user4556]

ATMs tend to be category A systems in a bank, there is a good chance it will be up and running fairly quickly. I would definitely report it though.

 

[Roo Stercogburn]

Yeh, it often BSODs just after I've hacked someone's account. Still ironing out the bugs.

You got the error code?

 

[rynnor]

The operating system is only 1 layer of the software on an ATM - I dont know of any that run unix - they tend to lag behind since banks are unsuprisingly unwilling to spend millions to get a new OS for no perceived benefit.

 

[Doh_boy]

The ATM machine itself maybe running windows but the underlying system is something called HP Non-stop. Used to be called Tandem but got bought out (twice).

It's an interesting platform, it was originally all about having no single point of failure. As the name suggests, having two of everything. Now it's more along the lines of fault tolerance. Their sales spiel says out of the box it should have 99.99% uptime but spend a bit of money and you can get to 99.9999% which, apparently, is 15mins of downtime a year.


I work on one of these systems three days a week but not for a bank so I'm not as well paid as those lucky blighters! :/

 

[rynnor]

The ATM machine itself maybe running windows but the underlying system is something called HP Non-stop. Used to be called Tandem but got bought out (twice).

Not that likely tbh - theres a lot of competition - theres a mix of IBM mainframes/Tandem mainframes and unix based systems around in europe.

 

[Raven]

The displays at the local Co-Op always have a flash error message. I always think it would be a bit geeky to point it out to the lovely bit of kit that works behind the till.

 

[Zenith.UK]

It's Co-Op ATMs that tend to fall over.
I've got a picture somewhere of a Co-Op ATM running the WinXP installation routine.

You'd be amazed just how much retail equipment runs Windows.

 

[Fweddy]

When I worked in Tesco the tills there ran windows. I discovered a bug in the till software so it would crash to desktop whenever I wanted but I could never figure out how to do more than that. I used to crash it every once and a while so I could take a 5 minute break while the manager went into the back to reset it

 

[Wij]

ATMs tend to be category A systems in a bank, there is a good chance it will be up and running fairly quickly. I would definitely report it though.

Cat A ? lolzorz

 

[MYstIC G]

Didn't ATM's originally start out running OS/2?

 

[old.Tohtori]

It happens fairly rarely, so the losses aren't worth rehauling the system.

If it's daytime, just walk in bank and get moneys.

 

[Wij]

Didn't ATM's originally start out running OS/2?

ATMs were around long before OS/2.

Also depends whose ATMs. They're all different.

 

[Zenith.UK]

No, actually he's right.
Many ATMs in the 90's ran OS/2 Warp. Hell, even some retailers are running it today, though many are upgrading to Windows as they upgrade equipment.

I know of a number of retailers still running apps on top of MSDOS 6.22. It's kind of strange to reinstall a whole system from a floppy disk when I can be using a DL-DVDR to ghost a till's drive for another retailer.
Thankfully more and more retailers are changing up to Windows based equipment with USB peripherals. It makes swapouts far easier.