Scientific Software

I work in the Pharmaceutical / Biotech industry. I often have to engineer systems that control scientific instruments that manufacture and quality check drugs. I've found one thing in common with a lot of this specialty software utilized by said systems: It sucks ass to install in any kind of managed environment.

Most of the instruments that I deal with require some kind of PC / computing infrastructure to control and analyze data. HPLC's, CE's, and other various giant instruments that do crazy things with chemicals all rely on usually some manner of serial connection to a computer. Unless, you're talking about Agilent, which usually does it over Ethernet and is so much more convenient. Anyhow, they usually ship with small form factor underpowered computers that have a default administrator account logging in automatically. (Yes, I'm looking at you Dionex, Agilent, and Beckman-Coulter.)

I've had to back-engineer a few of these systems to make them compliant with industry-standard specifications for security and reliability. One would think on an instrument running 24/7 that you'd at least ensure the computer controlling the instrument has better specifications than something you can get for $500 bucks at Best Buy.

It's always good practice to capture an image of one of these things as soon as the business end of your business starts using it. It will truly save you some disaster recovery headaches in the future when it ultimately fails and you have to rebuild it from scratch. The P2V converter from VMWare is wonderful for catching live systems and converting them to VM's, as well as the industry-standard Ghost utility - which seems to defy time and age and always seems to work no matter what. It's like Prometheus stole that one from the heavens.

Oh, and always keep a spare box of floppy disks around. I guarantee you that you will run into some kind of license that absolutely requires a floppy drive. And, it has to be the A: drive.