Hacker News Reader

TRWTF 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".

View on HN

Since 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.

Yes, I concur. There's all sorts of recovery methods available. Though it's nice to share war stories, I'd be a bit embarrassed to reveal the failure.

What happens when that system is Windows and gets dorked up by McAfee too? :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com