Aw, Snap! But you should see the other guy – they're in dire need of a good file system consistency check
- Reference: 1597921085
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/20/bork/
- Source link:
Reader "Clive The Commuter" spotted a BOGOF (bork one, get one free) as a pair of digital signs at London's Marylebone station had a wobble.
"Aw, Snap!" says a cheery edition of what we assume is Chrome. The RESULT_CODE_MACHINE_LEVEL_INSTALL_EXISTS hints at something a little more worrying, although our reader assured us that things were up and running by evening.
[1]
The other screen was not quite so happy; pleading for a manual fsck for its file system before the customised Debian distro would do whatever the supplier of the screens, RailPoint, expected it to do for UK rail company Chiltern.
[2]
Chiltern Railways, owned by Arriva Trains, is responsible for the services that tootle up the M40 corridor towards Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, and lays claim to Marylebone as its London terminus. It has several of these battery-powered screens, which can be wheeled around the station to assist passengers thanks to the magic of Wi-Fi. Or, in this case, bork.
Of the unhappy Debian-based device, Clive noted: "The hosed hard disk was in the same state of disrepair as the signalling and points on the Metropolitan Line (over which Chiltern runs), and what should have been a 30-min trip home stretched to three times the usual amount of time."
RailPoint has form for bork. Its Windows-based signage has already [3]featured in these pages and back then the company told us it was "about to upgrade all of our production machines to a custom Linux build to improve their stability and generally operate with more efficiency".
Behold the stability and efficiency. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/20/marylebonebork1.jpg
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/20/marylebonebork4.jpg
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/27/bork/
[4] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: I don't care....
My oldest devices in service are 8 and 10 years old and still on their original SD cards. The newer devices are doing things that require more speed so OS on SD card would cause a noticeable slow down. If the task is not demanding, you buy quality cards and over spec the capacity OS on SD can be fine. If you buy cards from the supermarket the cards might last a few hours but I would not trust them that long with valuable data.
Re: I don't care....
Make the on-card filesystems read-only, put all writable stuff into a ramfs, and there's no issue with using SD cards. Flash is destroyed by writing, not reading, and for something like this that’s just a thin-client to a web-hosted service, there’s no need for writable persistent storage on the device.
I would, however, have also designed this with a recovery image so that any corruption of that main flash could be blasted away easily by a quick dd, but as it’s a mobile unit anyway, access for repair is probably not as big an issue as for fixed stuff.
Rocket science or crash
Switch to Linux, they said. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, you should not expect a different result when the same (intellectually chalenged) designers and maintainers are employed, regardless of underlying system. Doing fail-resistant systems is hard, very hard. Making systems fail-safe (or fail safely systems) is even harder, very much harder. Just look at rocket science... We still have some devices floating out in space, very far away at 150+ AU, and still sending data. So, it can be done, building a stable system.
I do not think that anybody is prepared to pay for that any more.
Re: It can be done
"We still have some devices floating out in space, very far away at 150+ AU, and still sending data."
Apropos of SFA, this comment led me to Voyager site to confirm the distance gap between the 2 Voyagers. I said out loud, "oh, Voyager 2 is only 124 AU away" then smiled at the absurdity of that statement. I also noted that Voyager 1 is now 20.75 light hours away - I hope that someone's planning a party for the light-day milestone. :D
I don't care....
...What the sales rep told you! You should *never* run a production rootfs from a micro SD card!