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Comment by kogir | Hacker News Reader

The 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.

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> 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.

Without knowing why they chose a Window POS system, claiming Linux would have been better, or was even an option, is pure speculation. Give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they had reasons that made sense.

It's awesome that Linux saved the day and that the author was resourceful enough to pull it off, but the whole event still could easily have been avoided (and without having to change much at all).

As nice as it is to blame McAfee, only the end user can control the extent to which third parties can affect them.

At Loopt, we stagger both Windows and Ubuntu updates for this very reason. We do the same with our own code updates. It costs very little and has saved us on numerous occasions.

You 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.

Maybe they saw a virus infection spread so fast before that they must deploy the update ASAP?

I doubt it though.

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