Am I crazy in thinking that the shop I was in that has CentOS 3 running their self checkouts should have a more up to date and currently supported OS? These are brand new self checkouts (the shop has had them for about a year now, but you get my point.)

It’s a genuine question. Am I wrong in thinking that using this OS on a self checkout is a terrible idea? (FWIW this shop is an international retailer)

I have no stake in the shop or anything. I just happened to be there when they had to reboot a self checkout and I noticed the OS version as I was going by.

  • CountVon@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

    • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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      4 months ago

      Then there’s Dutch trains from NS running the time schedules on Vista until a few years ago…

    • tfw_no_toiletpaper@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      It does not, a few Cisco appliances in our company run / ran cent and AFAIK the infra teams all had to migrate to alma and move everything over with some script from Cisco.

    • delirious_owl@discuss.online
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      4 months ago

      Cent7 stopped getting updates last month. There is at least one mirror still providing the old updates. Not sure about newer versions

  • bloodfart@lemmy.ml
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    4 months ago

    I think I recognize that system by the monitor glare, where’d you take the picture?