German railway seeks IT admin to manage MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 systems

Clown Siemens, you say?

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)

the job was advertised as being remote.....

Exactly. And these things are on an internal bus network, but they are not connected to the internet.

Not sure how to link a reply on lemmy so I’ll just copy from another comment I wrote here:

I’m not talking about this specific instance, just that block of misinformation/generalisation. Saying that legacy systems are well-secured because they’re “battle tested” is sheer ignorance.

Take side-channel attacks for example. A timing attack is something programmers from the 60’s and 70’s would not have taken into account when writing their hashing algorithms. And speaking of hashing, what hashing algorithms were available back then? CRC32 or something similar? What about salting? You get the idea.

Not to mention that legacy operating systems don’t get security updates. Let’s assume that DOS is secure (which it definitely isn’t), but if that statement were correct, would it apply to Windows XP as well?

All I’m saying is that the article is dead wrong. As software developers in this century, we’ve come a long way. We’ve developed security best practices, written libraries and frameworks, and come up with mitigations for a lot of these security vulnerabilities. These solutions are something that closed-source legacy systems (and anything without active maintenance) would never benefit from.

The “ironing” is lost on you in this case.

It is when safety-critical systems are the target of a cyberattack.

The author’s rammar

Finally caught a *grammar cop doing a typo in the wild. Pure joy.

Yeah, Techspot is pretty trash

Or a middle-aged fart who did learn new stuff but remembers the old stuff too

Web 2.0 was a mistake.

Celebrating Ceaușescu's death? /j

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.

Me too.

In high school, there was a kid who was always trying to make money. Like even then, he wanted his own business. In fact he had a couple small ones back then.

One of his endeavours was massive LAN parties. He had the capital to rent spaces, hardware, and was even able to get sponsorships.

He did not have the tech chops to do it though.

Myself, and one circle of friends were THE computer nerds of the school, but it wasn't really seen as a negative for us - then again we did orchestrate a "free day" and got away with it by taking down the schools network from inside and one person had a loud fucking mouth, but we covered our tracks.

Anyways, we got in free to these LAN parties as long as we set up and maintained shit. Surprisingly very few problems, about once a LAN party we had to fix something. And it was useful experience.

That shit was fucking amazing. I loved it.

I got home from work. Wife works from home. She has had an ongoing tech issue I can't really touch because it's that companies property. But I just don't want to hear it. At all. I'm dead inside in that regard.

It's gotten so bad that I had an issue with my gaming rig.

I needed to reseat the RAM. Not hard, except the case is mounted on the wall as a display piece that would require moving a bunch of shit before getting a ladder and yada yada.

I just didn't game for three days. Just could not muster the energy to care about that. I hate it.

rely on code that’s still written in COBOL.

Does this really matter? It's more of a maintenance issue than a functional one.

It all gets compiled down to binary, anyways.

Only MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 are open-sourced under MIT license, anything newer is not. These versions were pretty bare-bones, only DOS 2.0 implemented directories for example.

Unless you mean FreeDOS, which is an open-source DOS-based operating system, which generally should work with any DOS programs/games, but it still may not be 100% compatible with some proprietary software.

Probably! APOLLO and SABRE and stuff look ancient.

Why change what isn't broken, right?

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.

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.

If you actually do have decades of fortran experience, work for NOAA. Their weather models are mostly fortran and they need engineers. Specifically the NOAA EPIC contract that i worked on previously definitely needs people knowledgeable in fortran and was 100% work from home. Feel free to DM me if you want more details.

It can be viewed as a success. A bridge or building that only lasts five years wouldn't be considered successful, especially if it took monumental effort to make it in the first place. For some reason, we don't value that in software.

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

There are probably many people in Japan with this skillset given that they're only now getting off disks for certain government processes.

The article itself says the listing has been removed :(

If it's in a current metasploit package you can be sure that someone is scanning the IP at some point.

Johnny Castaway can live on at least.

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).

I am so happy not to have to mess with that. LOADHIGH agony.

With dos 5.x I started creating some fancy auroexec menu at boot that switches between several configurations depending if I wanted to run windows, need a lot of xms or a big chunk of Ems (640k was NOT enough for everything).

It was somehow fun.

But at least, if something is not working, it was entirely your fault. Now? It's probably windows update who fucked up something you desperately need right now.

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 😅

If you take this job, you’re obsolete. Getting the next job will be tough.

There is a meme that COBOL programmers still make bank to this day because no one learns COBOL and old enterprise systems run on COBOL. How much of this is true?

DROS (DISC and Rust based Operating System)

It is definitely the exact opposite of this. Even though I understand why you would think this.

The thing with systems like these is they are mission critical, which is usually defined as failure = loss of life or significant monetary loss (like, tens of millions of dollars).

Mission critical software is not unit tested at all. It is proven. What you do is you take the code line by line, and you prove what each line does, how it does it, and you document each possible outcome.

Mission critical software is ridiculously expensive to develop for this exact reason. And upgrading to deploy on different systems means you'll be running things in a new environment, which introduces a ton of unknown factors. What happens, on a line by line basis, when you run this code on a faster processor? Does this chip process the commands in a slightly different order because they use a slightly different algorithm? You don't know until you take the new hardware, the new software, and the code, then go through the lengthy process of proving it again, until you can document that you've proven that this will not result in any unusual train behavior.

How much of that 60k is left after taxes? Is it enough to live on, or buy a home, or buy a home and support a family, or none of the above?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone, very informative and interesting. That's the kind of perspective that may not often be shared and helps understand costs of living.

For the Deutchlanders wondering about the USA's taxes and my question.... 60k would be enough to live on in most of the USA but might not be enough to buy a home or raise a family. But it's highly dependent on your area's cost of living, and the USA is massive with many different areas and tiers of costs of living.

My example for tax costs: I make more than 60k and I only had to pay about 20% of it to taxes and retirement for 2023, in the USA. In my low cost of living area, 60k would be enough to buy a house and support a family but it would have to be on a very frugal budget. I bought my house when I was making about 45k but my spouse also had an income of almost that much.

COBOL has entered the chat

e: good for legacy employment though. A relative of mine is a Z80 programmer by trade, and he can effectively walk into a job because the talent pool is so small now. Granted - the wages are never great but never poor, and the role is maintenance and troubleshooting rather than being on the leading edge of development - but it's a job for life.

Not to mention when you want to change the entire system it becomes a huge operation and problem.

I'd consider those various states of not working. So... Don't fix it if it's not broken!

ha, whats the failover look like???

Well I live in germany and therefore use the train network on short and long distance frequently and while it is unreliable, "a day" of delay is something I have never experienced.
Most of the delayed trains are late by less than one hour (still atrocious, but not a day's worth by any means).
I actually experienced only once a situation where we were given the choice of a hotel or a continuation of our travels by taxi (which we chose) because the train we were in was late one hour or something and the other (last for the day) train could not wait.

Afaik Deutsche Bahn loses 5 mil a day: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/oct/14/its-the-same-daily-misery-germanys-terrible-trains-are-no-joke-for-a-nation-built-on-efficiency

That's another part of the infrastructure, though: We just don't have enough rail as well as backup rolling stock.

And as the federation finally decided to spend some money it's going to get worse in the next decade or so due to outages due to new constructions being linked up to the old stuff.

As to the age of the infrastructure -- I mean it's the railway. If a rarely-used branch line still uses mechanical interlocks and there's no need to upgrade the capacity then the line is going to continue using infrastructure build in the times of the Kaiser. It's not like those systems are unsafe, it just might be the case that unlike in the days of ole those posts with a gazillion levers aren't manned all the time so you'll see an operator drive to it with a car while the train is on its way. Which really isn't that much of a deal when the branch line goes to a, what, quarry maybe sending out a train every two months or so. Certainly better than to demolish the line and use trucks instead.

German re-unification cost trillions. It's entirely unsurprising.

A lot of these systems are also always on.

Used to work at an airport that had a similar issue, turning some of these systems off simply isn't possible. So you end up having to run the replacement system simultaneously with the old system for a few days. Can't simply take it off line for a day.

Well, i suppose we can use the internet on them, what more should we want :-)

It's a private company... and the salary is not gonna be great.
Germany doesn't pay wages

The secret is to develop your software, then fire all the developers. Then it never changes again!

Come to think of it keeping developers on staff, and familiar with the codebase enough to debug it efficiently, almost guarantees they’re gonna be adding new features. “Well we’ve got this talent sitting around …” and then it’s new features and ….

I mean I guess this is evidence they’ve managed to isolate themselves from dependencies they don’t control. It’s the external dependencies updating and losing support that causes at least the minimum of codebase maintenance.

The fact they’ve stayed on this older platform indicates they’ve managed to avoid that constant upgrading. Because if any part of the system has to upgrade, it tends to pull the rest of the system with it.

This gem requires this version of ruby requires this operating system etc.

Or maybe they’ve isolated the parts really well and this is just some window3.11 container that’s one of a hundred services.

I’d love to go back to tech without the constant insomnia and panic attacks.

Just make it from scratch?

For sure there is so much useless shit in there, that's why nobody gets their head around it anymore.

Those german railways shouldn't be running proprietary winblows garbageware to begin with. Shouldn't they be running Suse?