Misleading title: SIEMENS Mobility is looking for said Windows 3.11 admin. NOT the German Railway
Deutsche Bahn is the circus and Siemens in this case the clowns.
Legacy hardware and operating systems are battle tested, having been extensively probed and patched during their heyday. The same can be said for software written for these platforms – they have been refined to the point that they can execute their intended tasks without incident. If it is ain’t broke, don’t fix it. One could also argue that dated platforms are less likely to be targeted by modern cybercriminals. Learning the ins and outs of a legacy system does not make sense when there are so few targets still using them. A hacker would be far better off to master something newer that millions of systems still use.
Tell me you know nothing about cybersecurity without telling me you know nothing about cybersecurity. Wtf is this drivel?
Simple solution: Don’t connect it to the Internet. Hackers hate this one weird trick.
And said trick ends when an attacker manages to socially-engineer their way in. (But maybe they’ll drop floppies instead of flash drives around the block this time)
You really think that infrastructure IT is dumb unless it can brush off a Stuxnet-like attack by the CIA and Mosad? Most RR traffic signals in the US are run with mechanical logic, physical switches connected to circuits closed by steel wheels on steel tracks. Do you really want a “move fast and break things” tech bro to update all this stuff for us?
All kinds of infrastructure uses ancient software because it’s reliable. Updating it just to protect from hackers causing damage is likely to cause that damage unintentionally while doing little to protect from hackers anyhow.
they can execute their intended tasks without incident
Now if only the Deutsche Bahn could do that too
The author’s grammar
rammarisnt that great as well. Those typos can be should have been catched easily by the spellcheck.Edit: Including me :p
The author’s rammar
Finally caught a *grammar cop doing a typo in the wild. Pure joy.
I know a guy fitted for the job. He’s well versed in MS-DOS, Win 3.1, 3.11 etc. Hell, he’s even fluent in German, but he’s due a hip and knee replacement this month…
That’s all I’m gonna say.
Good luck with the robot joints!
It’s the only way to keep the trains free from cylon interference.
Battletrain Deutchlandica
Ooh, someone is about to make BANK!
Why would someone make a lot of money from this?
Supply and demand. The people that have a lot of experience with those systems are retired or should be retiring soon.
Supply is pretty low. So they can demand higher pay.
DB’s demand is pretty strong. If those systems go down, trains don’t run, and that costs them millions.
It’s cheaper to pay someone a lot of money vs having their systems fail.
10/10 would install Doom on it.
Play doom with physical rails and trains
Migrating to FreeDOS might be feasible for them.
At least it’s not windows 8.
Let’s hope the salary is decent.
If it were a private company I’d bet it was astronomical. But I don’t know about the German government though, it’s hard to say.
It’s a private company… and the salary is not gonna be great.
Germany doesn’t pay wagesThe Federal Government is the sole owner of DB AG.
Since its foundation in 1994, Deutsche Bahn (DB AG) has been a public limited company and accordingly has a dual management and control structure. It is wholly owned by the federal government. The Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV) is responsible for managing the shareholding.
Shareholders gonna sharehold.
Remote? Do you connect yourself over telnet or what?
SSH to a KVMoIP or IPMI?
BMC is doubtful, other sources indicate that the hardware is from 1996, so it’s not just old software. So I’ll guess a KVMoIP device is bolted on (probably a relay on the power input, VGA, USB for keyboard and ‘floppy’ (Win3.11 was well before USB, but the hardware from 96 may have USB and the BIOS would likely make it viable for a DOS to use it).
Thats the reason, why they have Problems to find drivers (If you know, what i mean) 😜
Can I install Linux on the old systems so they work better?
This, I had multiple old machines with these kinds of specs, I put Slackware on them, dropped in an ethernet card (or two), and used them for all sorts of things, iptables firewall/router, email server, network storage, irc server, etc. It breathed new life into seriously outdated hardware.
If it works, don’t change it!
Yeah, that’s kinda the problem
We’re maintaining and developing OpenVMS OS, and both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders.
Many large companies maintain their old systems and use them for production or data processing purposes. Sometimes it’s too expensive to migrate off, but im many cases “it just works”Isn’t pretty much all airport scheduling based off software from the 80s or something?
Edit: Found a video about it.
I know for sure several airports are using OpenVMS, and there are more we don’t know about, as some companies keep running yheir stuff for decades not asking anyone for support.
And I’m sure There are multiple other old systems out there, it’s too hard to replace them.
And they work! Our VMS stuff runs great, it’s fast, and the uptime is measured in decades sometimes. So the problem is hardware: we rolled out the first production x86 version this year, so our users are fine (it’s still an issue of porting your software, but it’s not as terrible as building everything from scratch), but before that OpenVMS could run on Itanium servers at latest, and the platform was dying off since the beginning of 2000s, so it is a problem to find a normal replacement machine now.
both we and our customers need Cobol, Fortran, and other half-dead languages coders
Visual Basic? (fingers crossed)
Oh, I’m sorry man. I don’t know everything, I’m working there less than a year, but I only heard of VB a couple of times. In order of popularity it’s like: C, C++, Java, then everything else
I was just kidding - I haven’t touched Visual Basic in almost 20 years now. I’m not sure I could still code in it even if I wanted to.
I’ve seen those postings and some executive is living in dreamland thinking they can hire someone to do that for $25/hr.
My bosses tried to ask me if I knew anyone the could hire for a full time position at a hospital. I ask for more details and eventually they relent because they aren’t having any luck on indeed/craigslist/temp recruiter.
It’s a 24 hour on call position for ‘up to’ $55,000 to be the sole IT staff for a 100 bed hospital in upstate NY.
I literally laughed at them, but they seem to insist they are gonna find someone to take the job.
I actually think the job isn’t even legal as described.
Fucking delusional pricks.
Not gonna lie, part of me wants to relive the SoundBlaster and DOS extenders era and watch stuff with QuickTime. Tinkering with config.sys and autoexec.bat was quite fun back then.
Was it really FUN or is it not just nostalgia? I would not reaaaally want to fiddle with the autostart-crap again. It often took soooo long. Even with those auto-optimizers…
just nostalgia
Surely mostly nostalgia. But I do remember feeling a sense of accomplishment whenever I managed to run a game and get the sound working 😅
