[Liverpool] Malt

[Kovacs]

A few days ago i have seen the news about CERN project mitigating from Windows systems.I was wondering as an example some old analytic devices,(like spectroscopes) or any factory production devices ,which communicates through LPT/serial ports and has a long forgetten software/driver combination ,which bonded to god knows how old systems. Even some of these devices are connected to the internet,with out-dated security settings. I was wondering if there is any solution  for using these devices(reason: 'short budget'\ 'does the work anyway') in a modern environment. As we seen like a wannacry attack (lowering risk in a crucial production environment), or just make things more convenient.

As a sample setup i could imagine :
Any modern inexpensive basic workstation running linux and then there is a virtualization environment layer ,which runs the out dated software stack. And when there is a report/outgoing data ,it would be shared on the host device in a secured shared space.

And here comes the problem as far as i see the communication with the devices. There are lpt2usb,but i haven't seen any full featured,because of the lack of the IC chip which commonly used.  And than i saw PCBS used a i2cLPT which could be a totally full feature solution. Additionally  i2c is capable of handling  multiple device (well of course not at the same time ,but could be scheduled). So in theory even a small esp8266 or a raspberrypi could handle these connections as a gateway,after all this on the linux host we could tunnel these connections to the vm. This might be just one part of the problem ,but i see a great potentional using similar ideas as a costefficient solution.  And  this could be great oppurtunities for schools,research labs ,factories,etc. 

P.S.: Sorry for the long post, and I would be interested in your opinion on this matter. 
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