For most people 3am is a time when they’re tucked up warm in bed, but for me the other week I happened to be at a railway station and noticed the Myki machines were busy doing their end of day processing. So what does it look like?
The first step is putting up a ‘Out of Service!’ message.
Next up, a splash screen for defunct information technology system provider Affiliated Computer Services, and an old BIOS version – 1.2.116-08.August 2006.
Then the machine dropped into the Phoenix-AwardBIOS boot screen.
It shows that the ticket machine is fitted with a Hitachi HEJ421040G9AT00 40GB 2.5″ Parallel ATA hard drive as the primary boot device, and a Transcend 2.0 solid state drive as the secondary.
The BIOS boot sequence then continues.
Until the Myki software itself is started.
Loading location information, followed by “tariff” data – currently up to version 433.
‘Tariff loaded’ displayed on completion.
Leaving the Myki machine back ready for use.
The whole reboot loop process took around 3 minutes, but loading the Myki software itself takes less than 30 seconds.
Footnote: the end of day for public transport
The end of day for Myki fares is 3am.
You can travel on Night Trains, Night Trams and Night Buses with myki and will be charged your usual fare. You won’t be charged a return fare if you touch on before 3am. A new day of myki fares begins at 3am.
Footnote: so how may tariff versions are there?
Back in January 2016 tariff data was only at version 179.
So, what does it actually do? What does “processing” involve? And, will this change with the new contract?
Pretty sure it’s just a standard overnight scheduled reboot. Most enterprise computers a scheduled to reboot once a day to stop system slowdowns and get any server side updates that might need loading.
Looks like they are still using Windows CE, end of life 5 years ago. I hope those payment terminals are secured somehow.
The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) means they need to have it sorted – and the credit card reader is an off-the-shelf unit that talks to the ticket machine, so it’s secured from that perspective. Also the current card readers date to 2015.
https://twitter.com/aussiewongm/status/682084611459973120
So you don’t get the full two hours if you go out after 1am on Friday and Saturday nights, since you have to touch on for your return trip before 3am?
What happens if you’re travelling when daylight savings starts and ends?
Good to see Hitachi still making a contribution to Victoria’s public transport!
I’d have to try it out, but it seems like it might work that way – I’d assume a touch on at 2.59am would still lets you touch off within the next two hours as normal, but a second touch on would trigger a new ‘2-hour fare product’ to be created.
This is just the top-up machines, not the other touch-on/off readers. Whatever software runs them is likely to be a lot simpler and may not even require a regular full and dedicated PC and OS, so it wouldn’t need to have daily reboots.
Also this is just a local reboot of the machines, it’s not like they would bring the entire system down daily for a reboot as the servers running it all would have it’s own redundancy systems.
But even if it the whole thing did to down, I still don’t see it just dropping any ongoing fares. If done right it should write to a log and not just keep it in memory as that would be horribly prone to data loss otherwise.