Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicpottier | Hacker News Reader

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My wife is a sewer commissioner for a tiny sewer district up in the mountains. It is a state of the art facility from a water treatment perspective since the treated water exits into a mountain stream. However, they recently needed to update their control systems because they all currently run on Windows98 and can no longer get spare parts from their vendors etc..

At her request I sat in on a meeting with their vendor to ask some stupid questions (but less stupid than what the commissioners would have asked) about their proposal for updating the control systems.

Some crazy things discovered:

* it's all windows, all the time. I don't know why but I find this disturbing, but apparently all the drivers for these systems only work on windows. I guess Linux is only just starting to penetrate this market.

* yes, remote access is a thing (even in the old system), especially in this case where the plant it under 20 feet of snow half the year. They claim the system can only monitor things, not control things, but I wonder how locked down that really is. Security is via a VPN.

* the vendor at play here seems to be a tiny shop of a few people that basically serve a few dozen sewer treatment plants in the area. They deal with replacing the hardware and programming these interfaces in.. kind of a crazy local cottage industry I just wasn't really aware of.

Having a background in web services / unix left me pretty unprepared to really do much more than ask some stupid questions around security / obsolescence, but the vendor had reasonable answers to my concerns. Just a very different world than what we think about every day.

Omg that really is crazy and disturbing that a small development shop would hitch their wagon to the most popular desktop OS in the history of the world.

Desktop OSes are for browsing the internet and editing documents... complex, rapidly evolving, not very reliable or sensitive to reliability. It's terrifying enough to involve a Mac in a stage performance.

Does the popularity make their jobs easier?

Is that a serious question? Is selling Windows software that a user can install in 5 minutes easier than selling Linux software which likely requires a municipality to buy all new computers (and all the local government budgeting that involves), teach all its employees a new OS, standardize on things like distros and window managers, and then maybe be able to run it? Yes, it's much easier.

Where it's sketchy to find Windows is inside the chassis of some piece of specialized equipment with its own control panel. You may not even realize that what you're working with is a full-screen Win32 app until you get a bluescreen or taskbar popop or something. Then you learn that in addition to the domain-specific software/hardware and what you're trying to use it for, you've got a whole Windows desktop worth of reliability risk in there.

If it's just a touchscreen or hardware buttons, you may need a key to open a panel where the keyboard/mouse are, or to bring your own keyboard/mouse, in order to navigate the Windows part of the interface to fix the problem.

Obviously if it's intended to be networked to existing desktops for control over a LAN, the client software will be Windows, but even then you hope the server isn't.

Everybody knows Windows a bit. Even my retired mom who isn't a native english speaker could click few times on Next button, which might be enough to deploy controlling software with default settings. Good luck with Unix.

Outside our tech bubble working on Unix is still perceived as hollywood-style hacking of the bank and folks really have no clue, unless its done in GUI just like... you guessed it, Windows. Folks wouldn't even touch it.

OMG did they really pick an OS that's so known for its unreliability that it coined "the blue screen of death" and that people now expect it to update without their consent?!?!

Windows is an awful choice for any system that must be reliable. I know, because the industrial control system at my workplace used to be windows, and cost us mega bucks every year in down time. Now it's Linux, and we haven't had ANY downtime in over two years.

Re Windows all the time: I don't think Linux is the right alternative. GPOS use should be as minimal as possible for safety-critical systems like this.

This exactly. I've come across linux systems doing control work in pentests before, and they can be just as miserably protected as windows systems -- possibly more so, because they're on some forsaken SoC that needs a custom kernel and userland to work, and it hasn't been updated in 15 years, there are privilege escalation attacks galore and the vendor has some backdoor user account enabled.

All this to say, Windows isn't the worst thing ever necessarily, and ideally you want a system that's purpose built and only does what is required with the least amount of code/systems possible.

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