Now you see it; now you don’t

I don’t think I’m dating myself, but I remember when the dongle on a DeltaV system was this big, black thing that plugged in (and screwed down) into a parallel port on your ProPlus. Now everyone saw the writing on the wall – as parallel ports started to disappear, parallel port dongles were going to have to give way to something else.

Enter the USB dongle. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against these guys, but my first thought when I opened that little black box was “that’s really cute – I’m going to lose this”. I must not have been the only one with that thought because each dongle comes with this wire lanyard attached.  See, without being able to secure the dongle in a USB port, that little sucker is going to get lost or sheared off or something else.

 

And let’s not forget our well-meaning IT dude (you met him in my last post). That dongle looks a whole lot like a USB memory stick, and he will try relentlessly to run an anti-virus program against it.

The other thing that’s happened is the good old PS/2 ports for keyboards and mice have followed the parallel port out of our lives. Now your keyboard and mouse need a USB port also.  Combine this with a trend away from so many USB ports (cyber security and all), and we’ve got ourselves a dongle location gap (you can just imagine George C. Scott in the War Room with Dr. Strangelove, can’t you?)

So guess what’s INSIDE the Dell computers designated for use with DeltaV? An internal USB port. How cool is that? I had no idea until Mark Moore and Russ Wolterman pointed them out to me. Now they’re in slightly different places depending on the computer, so you might have to look around (this picture is from a T3500).

 

 

Plug your dongle into one of these, lock the case, and it's not going to walk away or get broken off. Make yourself a label and place it on the outside of the computer so everyone knows what’s inside (well, almost everyone – make it a little cryptic), and you’re good to go.

IT vs IT

About twice a month, Emerson issues updates to a list of what Microsoft operating system patches and hotfixes have been tested and approved for installation on DeltaV computers. On top of what is or is not approved, there’s extensive information on the Emerson web site regarding cyber security, for protecting the process control network from harm. Emerson’s not the only automation platform supplier that test and approve/disallow patches and hotfixes for their products.

So it really bothers me that twice in the last month, some well-intentioned business IT dude has applied Microsoft patches that have rendered automation systems useless. I guess it’s not really their fault; it’s in their DNA – if there’s a patch or hotfix to apply, by golly they’re going to install it. All those precautions we take with firewalls, virus protection software and built for purpose, lockdown-able port switches just can’t protect us from our well-meaning IT buddies.

Here are some suggestions to help avoid these situations in the future:

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  Don’t tell IT where your servers are. They can’t patch what they can’t find.  

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  Create a Props server rack. You’ve seen them anytime you’ve gone furniture shopping – sitting on the entertainment center shelves are these components manufactured by Props. Now they look a little “off” and don’t weigh a thing, but that’s OK – your IT friend will try relentlessly to stick the patching CD in a disc drive.

The real answer?  Frequent "meeting of the minds" between business and automation IT professionals. There’s a fundamental difference between the IT requirements on business networks and those of a real-time automation or control platform. There are plenty of articles on the web discussing this. But all the articles are worthless if there’s no communication between these two critical team members. Now you don’t have to hug him, but maybe you could take him a basket of muffins?