![]() NASA and JPL have probably the worst situation of all, having to use 1970's hardware to maintain some of their missions, e.g. My point is that there is a finite lifespan for those solutions - virtualization vendors will eventually drop support, and hardware will die (I know of companies that have warehouses of old machines to harvest for spare parts for exactly that reason). Airgapping helps with the cyber risk, but the broader continuity risk is substantial. It hadn't been shut off in 20 years, so who knows if it would even boot up again. You wouldn't believe the stuff I've see.including a Windows 95 PC running PCAnywhere connected to a phone line for external maintenance that drove a hundred million dollar production line. Oh definitely understand, and I've done cyber assessments for similar situations. but updating all the software tools is another matter entirely. I'm on a team that does obsolescence management - and as I said earlier, by virtualizing the computers, I can at least get off the dependency of the old Sparc servers and IBM PCs. Therefore, my development environments are combinations of DOS and (up to) Windows XP to run these old applications. Thus, we need to use the original Intel development tools - all 16-bit applications. The software is all burned to EPROM/EEPROM chips on the boards, so no way to interface, etc. These systems are running on embedded systems hardware, not connected to the outside world. It is the most sensible and economical choice for both the utilities and us, the OEM vendor, to maintain the existing systems. That costs money to perform, not counting the time the plant can NOT be up and running, generating power (and therefore income) - resulting in the loss of many millions. Then, since the design basis has changed, the plant's operating license needs to be renewed/updated, which can take potentially up to 2 years, depending upon the governing body. The cost of upgrading/replacing the control system hardware alone would be in the millions. I work on safety systems for nuclear power plants. Maybe in the product if there's legacy OS options split it into two sections 'Supported' 'Legacy' in the someone has a $100M piece of equipment that requires XP to manage and maintain, ok, I might understand running it airgapped - but if the org doesn't even have plans to resolve the dependency, then at this point that's just negligent. Once Apple discontinues support for the new MacOS release on Intel (which at the current rate will be announced at WWDC in 2025), there's no legacy code base to support going forward.īut for the clarification that the website is the authoritative source. Better to pay that debt on your schedule vs the hackers.įor Fusion, there is one thing to look forward to. At some point, unfortunately often after a breach, it becomes a non-option, and then they have to both do the replacement as well as pay an IR company. Tech debt is a real thing, and close to the top cybersecurity risk for companies. Sorry, it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade to modern, supported, secure systems. For Fusion though, in many cases we see here, it's because someone prefers running Quicken 2007 or Photoshop 6, and don't want to pay for the new release. If someone has a $100M piece of equipment that requires XP to manage and maintain, ok, I might understand running it airgapped - but if the org doesn't even have plans to resolve the dependency, then at this point that's just negligent. Totally get that, and in this particular case, with the code signing issue alone, there would be regular and on-going tools updates required. From what you are explaining about Apple's constantly changing APIs, maybe keeping Workstation and Fusion using the same codebase is no longer the most practical route for VMware to take. It's frustrating to have things working but not quite, and the company keeps plowing along, caring more about the 'latest and greatest thing' from MS and Apple. ![]() However, now that the drive mapping stopped working at 16.2.0, I had to freeze my work computers to use 16.1.2 forever. ![]() I thank the stars that Darius was able to fix the video driver and add the missing CGA mode 6 that one of my applications uses, and get that into version 16 - so that I am able to eliminate my physical DOS computer and run everything in the VM now. It to me is still the best product and technology out there, but Ulli said it best before - Workstation 7 had the best feature set, 12-ish was probably the most stable, and it's gone downhill from there. It's just super frustrating to have grown with a product since 2003 and watched it become great, then mediocre, then struggling. Sorry, didn't mean to completely rant here, Mike.
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