A poll on the acceptability of software based C&A

[Dean Roddey]

Being the vendor of a software based C&A system (www.charmedquark.com), I catch a lot of flack from professional installers that PC based systems are inherently incapable of being made robust, and therefore are unacceptable in any way, shape, or form.

Clearly, a PC used in a daily sort of way, with constant access by the user to the net, porn surfing, installing all kinds of questionable apps and so forth can lead to instability in a general purpose PC. But I believe that when used as a 'C&A appliance' in a closet, managed over the net indirectly via the C&A system's management system, so no exposure to the network via shares or daily usage, that they be made more than robust enough for this application.
If you want to go further, you can create a CD based boot image, combined with a small RAID system for data redundancy.

What are your feelings on this front?

- Do you believe that PC based control and automation is just anathema, period?

- Do you believe that the kinds of 'hardening' above can make them acceptable?

- How important is this robustness in terms of price differential, or would you just prefer to ghost the disk and put it back if it ever freaks out and pay less?

- How important is it in a software based C&A product that the product integrate into your existing computers vs. how important is it for that product to come on hardened hardware and kept isolated?

- And any other comments you might have on the subject.

[Forumadmin]

If you want to go further, you can create a CD based boot image, combined with a small RAID system for data redundancy.
Do you believe that PC based control and automation is just anathema, period?

Not a chance. However there must be caveats within this comment. I don’t want to rant on about what is world’s best practice however from my experience there is a place for PC based systems and the technology exists today to achieve it. The problems are many and varied, suffice to say if mum and dad are going to use the same PC for creating letters and mailing them of to number 1 son via the internet, things can and will go belly up.



Do you believe that the kinds of 'hardening' above can make them acceptable?

Without a doubt. Fact is, a solid state solution based on a Linux kernel would be one of my dreams. More on this another day.




How important is this robustness in terms of price differential, or would you just prefer to ghost the disk and put it back if it ever freaks out and pay less?

Ghosting disks, raid cards, mirror sets etc etc == “things people don’t understand or want to know about” hence solid state, Linux kernel etc.


How important is it a software based C&A product that the product integrate into your existing computers vs. how important is it for that product to come on hardened hardware and kept isolated?

Oh boy, what a topic. Having just spent the last 3 days in Adelaide, my brain hurts. There exists today a huge vacuum of knowledge in the integrator networks when it comes to loading software onto PC’s to drive anything relating to C&A or anything else related, home automation etc. Throw in a dose of the internet and merging technologies and you have space with know one in it. Staggering! But true.

Integrators have been focusing on their core roles and have been doing it really well, the cost however is a huge lack of knowledge in the IP/computer/internet/routing/security/wireless arena.



And any other comments you might have on the subject.I haven’t started yet.



In summary the technology exists, the costs and expertise to get it there do not.



My .2c

[Dean Roddey]

For my part at least, I'm in a position to provide both a pure software only solution, and effectively the same solution in an 'appliance', basically a hardened and locked down PC in a pure kiosk type mode (or it could also have keyboard and mouse if you wanted.) I've been looking around for a company interested in taking on this packaging part of it, because it's something I can't afford to do and don't have the expertise in. I'm offering quite reasonable terms, but so far haven't gotten a bite. I think that even at retail prices one could put together such an appliance based on CQC that would be competitive with Crestron type devices, with a good profit margin, and even more so if getting the parts at wholesale prices.

And I can offer basically five variants. Pure software, pure hardware, or hardware backend and client interfaces running on other machines in the network, the hardware part having both back and client and clients on other machines in the network, and the hardware part having both back end and client and other machines being able to run parts of the back end and run the client.

For me, it would have to be Embedded XP, not Linux. But that would still provide quick boot times, drastically smaller OS image so you could put it on a flash chip and never worry about it changing, and ability to easily run the whole thing 128MB, which is trivial these days. It would only require the weakest of CPUs, so one of those tiny form factor MBs with maybe a 500Mhz CPU, 128MB, and onboard ethernet, USB, and Firewire, in a SFF enclosure, and either a multiport serial card in a PCI slot, or something like the Glocal Cache GC-100 connected via ethernet to provide serial, contact closure, IR blaster/sensor ports, and you'd have a very nice little system that could be put together for a good price I think.

[Colin Smith]

Embedded XP or Linux would be my preferred solution. For the last 10 years I have looked after the flight information systems at Auckland International Airport Ltd. They have a lot of dedicated applications running on Windows and Unix platforms that were not embedded and they worked fine. I have found Windows 95 and up to be stable platforms as long as the application running was well written and had no user input. However, any of the applications that had an end user at an interface gave us grief on a weekly basis.
I feel the solutions we were running there were fine in that environment. If we were looking to run the applications on user premises many many miles away then I would want the system to be embedded. If you were to run RAID or other precautions you may as well embed the system.
Keeping the end user as far away from the software is an imperative in my books.

Colin Smith

[Dean Roddey]

We are making progress on this front. Our first (non-embedded) platform is being worked on now. It will serve to both help us begin to work on pricing and packaging issues, and to quickly provide a product to folks who are happy to have a general purpose PC for this job, but who don't want to set it up themselves. Our next iteration will be that same effective platform but without a hard drive and with eXP.

[rhamer]

I work for a company that produces software for the emergency services. Before I started there I worked for a company that used this software.

The environment that we created to run this software was extremely stable. It originally ran WinNT and we could run the servers for years at a time without needing a reboot (something most people thought was impossible with NT).

The key was to keep the users away from as much of the system as possible.

The desktops were locked down and only ran a single application, they could not run Word, check their email or access the internet and as a result they virtually never broke.

The problem with PC based solutions is they run on a thing that is now familiar to almost everybody. If it ran on a 3270 terminal no one would touch it. I think the real trick for the mass market is to use an imbedded PC with whatever OS you like. This will break the association between the PC and the user.

I know of several people who try to run their buisness software on a PC during the day and then let their kids load and play games on it at night. It doesn't work, sooner or later the kids trash the buisness software if not the whole machine.

Put it in a box and hang it on the wall and it will work for ever.

At least thats what I think.

Regards

Rohan

[Dean Roddey]

Agreed. I think though that it's fine to sell the software only version, but with just the caveat that support is provided on a best effort basis and that due to environmental circumtsances beyond out control it might just not work for you. That's unlikely, but it's possible and we just have to give you your money back and part friends.

For CQC that's less likely than for most, because it only uses the most basic system services and encapsulates everything that touches the system into a couple low level DLLs, and the entire rest of the system (it's half a million lines of code) are built purely in terms of those 'virtual kernel' libraries. So it very much isolates us from the vagaries of system configuration and it's rare that we get problems of the sort that so plague so many other programs that are built on top of the high level third party services available.

Still, we definitely are going to provide those hardware based systems, and the one we'll push the most will be the flash-based diskless eXP based system. It will be the least maintenance for the user and for us. It will be cut down and locked down very heavily and won't be useful as a general purpose PC because it won't have any LAN level stuff enabled. It'll work purely at the sockets level and only will expose those sockets that are required.

This of course assumes that the eXP deployment tools will let us really strip it down as much as we'd like. But the nice thing about it, if it does work, is that it's not just that the stuff is there and all you have to do is get to the desktop and turn it back on. The stuff just won't be there since it'll be stripped out (as much as possible) from the OS image.