On 3 February 2016 at 08:00, Craig Sanders via luv-talk <luv-talk@luv.asn.au> wrote:

even specialised scientific instruments work fine like this - i remember
a few (brand-new, latest models, selling for many tens of thousands
of dollars) instruments that absolutely required NT 2000 or something
similarly ancient at a $previous_employer. We installed NT under vbox,
gave it access to the right PCI-e etc ports, and it just worked. It was
configured to boot vbox in full screen mode. the idea was that a) it had
no direct access to the rest of the network, the linux host acted as a
firewall/bastion host, b) storage of capture data was to a samba share,
so if it got compromised, we'd just blow away the NT vm and re-image it.

presumably the same can be done with many medical diagnostic instruments.

Hi Craig,

I'm interested in your solution above. My team and I support research at Monash Uni and increasingly are supporting legacy hardware and windows OSs used to drive specialist instruments. Often, as you'd be familar, the PC is supplied by the instrument vendor with the instructions like we won;t support this if you deviate from our installation etc or we won't support if you use a different PC.

A competing tension them comes from the researchers, we want to acces the corporate network etc.

Then comes a time when the PC has aged/failed, we can't ge the acient OS (XP, NT) to run on modern hardware...and so on.

So I assume by vbox you mean VirtualBox? I'm not overly familiar with it (I've run it for curisoty sake but haven't looked into at depth) but your post suggests that it's more apt to be given or configured for deeper access to hardware than say VMware?

Colin Fee
tfeccles@gmail.com