14/08/2005

Never run an ATM on NT4

entry posted by Inquisitor at 16:26 (permalink).
categories: Microcode , Personal

I've just had my debit card eaten by a Bank of Scotland ATM at the Shandwick Place branch in Edinburgh (the second one as you head towards Princes Street) and I'm not happy. Especially since the card in question was from a completely different bank. Aaargh...

It was an interesting event, no doubt about it: I walked up to the ATM, inserted said debit card into the machine, and watched as it failed to put up the "Enter your PIN" screen, instead flashing to a Windows desktop, logging off, shutting down to the sight of the NT4 Workstation logo, rebooting for a suspiciously long time, loading an old McAfee VirusScan and finally bringing up a "Sorry, this machine is out of service" screen - all this while not even thinking about ejecting my card (although whirring the cash motors during the reboot almost felt like it was taunting me.) I thus rang the HBoS line, helpfully printed on the front of the ATM, at this point, to be told there was no way the machine would give me my card back, to go ring my bank's lost-and-stolen cards line and get it cancelled, and that they really were so dreadfully sorry. How infuriating.

Whilst the process of getting the card cancelled and reissued is just a five-minute call to an 0870 number (although now I have to wait a week for them to sent a new card back), it's still really annoying to have this kind of thing happen to you because instead of using a fully tested, reference platform environment (like, funnily enough, my bank's, which has entirely text-based ATMs running on top of what appears to be a custom operating system) NCR have just tacked some pretty pictures on top of the now no-longer-supported-and-security-flawed-to-hell NT4, put it on a local Intranet instead of a custom protocol just so they can display "Buy Your Mortgage At HBoS" with graphics rather than text. I'm sure custom-OS ATMs can crash too, but they seem a hell of a lot more secure to me and at least they'll probably ask for my PIN first.

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