Reply to post: Typical PoS system

Typical PoS system

I used to work for a company that serviced PoS systems such as these. As someone that was seen as little more than a "remote controlled screwdriver" I can attest this is pretty typical. I believe that the kiosk is in the middle of a re-imaging procedure. Its very typical for these to have extremely high levels of automation that include plaintext passwords, but these passwords are typically only used in very specific scenarios during set-up, then the set-up script will change them to something unique at the end of the configuration process.

Most PoS systems receive regular abuse with being powered off incorrectly and therefore frequently get corrupted. In some locations where employees were particularly careless I would have to re-image a terminal ever other month until management caught on to the extra expenses form repeated repairs not covered under the service contract. (Software corruption not due to hardware failure was generally not a covered repair).

Additionally, these systems are locked down so hard that its usually impossible to run normal repair tools such as SFC and Chkdsk, making a re-image needed in any scenario where there is software corruption.

The BSOD in the other article looks to be on a KDS (Kitchen Display System) controller or similar piece of hardware. These usually have a version of Windows embedded that is stripped of every unneeded file and service so that there is no way to even access a desktop. In fact, they may not even have drivers for a keyboard installed they are locked down so hard.

Al of these devices run some sort of stripped-down, embedded version of Windows. Most are on PoS Ready7 now, but some older ones are still running PoS 2009 (a.k.a. Windows XP Embedded).

Linux is almost never used, unfortunately. Microsoft has bent over backwards to include special, not well advertised features in Windows Embedded versions. For example, look up XFS, and I don't mean the file system, this is eXtensions for Financial Services. XFS was pretty much created solely to entice ATM vendors to Windows and away from OS/2 instead of switching to something like Linux, Unix, or BSD.