Where does it say that? It says that the source says that they are mobile apps (so obviously NOT Windows) that “look like they were designed for Windows 95”.
Comment on Microsoft says Delta’s ancient IT explains long outage after CrowdStrike snafu
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months agoIronically it debunks it by saying, yes, Southwest has key scheduling applications running on 3.1 and 95.
kalleboo@lemmy.world 4 months ago
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Southwest uses internally built and maintained systems called SkySolver and Crew Web Access for pilots and flight attendants. They can sign on to those systems to pick flights and then make changes when flights are canceled or delayed or when there is an illness.
“Southwest has generated systems internally themselves instead of using more standard programs that others have used,” Montgomery said. “Some systems even look historic like they were designed on Windows 95.”
SkySolver and Crew Web Access are both available as mobile apps, but those systems often break down during even mild weather events, and employees end up making phone calls to Southwest’s crew scheduling help desk to find better routes. During periods of heavy operational trouble, the system gets bogged down with too much demand.
I don’t know what “look historic” is supposed to mean, but if it looks like it was developed on Windows 95 that’s 99% of the time because it was developed on Windows 95. Mobile apps “are available” wasn’t as definitive as perhaps the author intended - meaning what, exactly? It’s an option?
If it’s a homegrown app (and good for them if so - every weasel IT manager in the world has been trying to bring them down for it since day one I’ll bet), and it was written originally for Win95 and it’s still in use, the bet would be it’s run inside a VM on whatever they use now. Should whatever they use now go into a boot loop - theoretically - they could run it natively if they had to.
All speculation of course.
TeoTwawki@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Omg its so hard to reboot into safemode delete one bad file and then reboot again. SO HARD guys. So lets run windows 3.1 and windows 95 and deploy old crusty windows 2008 servers again till this vlows over. /s
I’m in IT for a living. Even my dimmest bulbs at my company were able to solve this and keep the same pc running, minus crowdstrike’s bad update. I struggle to imagine what it must be like for other companies IT staff to make the choices they did during this.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Complexity increases exponentially in large organizations, for a number of reasons.
TeoTwawki@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I know my industry thanks. I’ve over a decade of experiance in sizable complex organizations. You know who else likes to cling rmto outdated hardware and software? Hopefully this scares you because it should: medical organizations.
What they peoppe did during this fiasco was objectively worse but everyone in this thread just isn’t happy that I didn’t join them in shitting on microsoft. This is where lemmy shows that its users are becoming more like reddit users every day.
Hopefully none of those systems were exposed to anything internet facing for obvious reasons, but given the shear incompetance observed I wouldn’t be surprised.
Bob_Robertson_IX@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Hi, I also know my industry, with over a quarter century of experience in Fortune 500 companies. The old motto of IT used to be ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ and then salespeople found out that fear is a great sales tool.
When proper precautions are taken and a risk analysis is performed there is no reason that old operating systems and software can’t continue to be used in production environments. I’ve seen many more systems taken down from updates gone wrong than from running ‘unsupported’ software. Just because a system is old, doesn’t mean it is vulnerable, often the opposite is true.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 4 months ago
Yes, yes it is if you run bitlocker with external verification.
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
…and just how many PCs do you intend to “reboot into safemode delete one bad file and then reboot again”? Manually, or do you have some remote access tool that doesn’t require a running system?
TeoTwawki@lemmy.world 4 months ago
[deleted]lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
If you have no idea how long it may take and if the issue will return - and particularly if upper management has no idea - swapping to alternate solutions may seem like a safer bet. Non-Tech people tend to treat computers with superstition, so “this software has produced an issue once” can quickly become “I don’t trust anything using this - what if it happens again? We can’t risk another outage!”
The tech fix may be easy, but the manglement issue can be harder. I probably don’t need to tell you about the type of obstinate manager that’s scared of things they don’t understand and need a nice slideshow with simple words and pretty pictures to explain why this one-off issue is fixed now and probably won’t happen again.
As for the question of scale: From a quick glance we currently have something on the order of 40k “active” Office installations, which mostly map to active devices. Our client management semi-recently finished rolling out a new, uniform client configuration standard across the organisation (“special” cases aside). If we’d had CrowdStrike, I’d conservatively estimate that to be at least 30k affected devices.
Thankfully, we don’t, but I know some amounts of bullets were being sweated until it was confirmed to only be CrowdStrike. We’re in Central Europe, so the window between the first issues and the confirmation was the prime “people starting work” time.
FiskFisk33@startrek.website 4 months ago
No it doesn’t, nowhere does it say that.
homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world 4 months ago
That kind of language will get you kicked in the balls by engineers. Sure. It should make it “clear” that they’re not running on *this OS or that OS.
And what should also be made clear is that statement is an assumption. A probable one, IMO, a reasonable one, but an assumption nonetheless and therefore no one can call it a fact unless they just want to pretend to be right.
I ojbect to using language like “it looks like a thing so it’s OBVIOUSLY a thing, you morons” being presented as irrefutable evidence of some sort.
The fact that it’s an assumption should further make it clear that no, this is not a fact, and stating it as a fact is bullshit or deliberate misrepresentation.