IT administrators are struggling to deal with the ongoing fallout from the faulty CrowdStrike update. One spoke to The Register to share what it is like at the coalface.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the administrator, who is responsible for a fleet of devices, many of which are used within warehouses, told us: “It is very disturbing that a single AV update can take down more machines than a global denial of service attack. I know some businesses that have hundreds of machines down. For me, it was about 25 percent of our PCs and 10 percent of servers.”
He isn’t alone. An administrator on Reddit said 40 percent of servers were affected, along with 70 percent of client computers stuck in a bootloop, or approximately 1,000 endpoints.
Sadly, for our administrator, things are less than ideal.
Another Redditor posted: "They sent us a patch but it required we boot into safe mode.
"We can’t boot into safe mode because our BitLocker keys are stored inside of a service that we can’t login to because our AD is down.
I didnt know so many servers still run windows.
Proxmox with windows containers is used widely
On prem AD. At least for my MSP’s clients. Have been pushing hard last few years to migrate to azure.
I can’t imagine how much work it would be to migrate all your services onto Linux. The problem was people adopting windows in the first place.
I love the Linux bros coming out of the woodwork on this one when this could have very well have been Linux on the receiving end of this shit show. Given that it’s a kernal level software issue, and not necessarily an OS one.
It’s largely infeasible to use Linux for many, most, of these endpoints. But facts are hard.
They are just butt hurt that this whole thing really shines a light on how inaccurate the line of “the world runs on Linux” truly is.
The world runs on a lot of different things for different reasons and that does not fit nicely into their Richard Stallman like world view.
The is no single Linux. It’s not a monoculture like that. There are many distros with different build options, different configurations and different components.
Also culture is different. Very few Linux admins would be happy putting in a closed blob kernel driver for anything. In Windows world that’s the norm, but not Linux.
What’s just happened to Windows world would be harder in Linux world. At worse, one distros rolls out a killer update. Some distros would just reboot to the previous kernel.
Hey man, let us have this one. Any immutable/atomic distribution could have either prevented this or easily rolled back the update. Not to mention a Linux offering by something like Red Hat, for example, wouldnt recommend installing closed source third party kernel modules for exactly this reason. Not sure about the feasibility of these endpoints, but the way things are generally done on, and the philosophy of, Linux could very well have avoided this catastrophe.
Can you explain what is immutable/atomic distribution and how it can prevent this?
An immutable distribution is one that treats the system files as read-only. Applications are handled separately, and updates to the system are done in an image-based way, rather than changing a few updated files, basically the OS gets replaced with an updated version. It prevents users or malicious outsiders from just changing system files. Fedora Silverblue and SteamOS as found on Valve’s Steam Deck are examples of immutable distros.
Now, with soemthing like Crowdstrike that operates in kernel space…I’m too far outside my wheelhouse to grasp how that would work on an immutable system. How it would be implemented.
I’m the corporate world, very much Windows gets used. I know Lemmy likes a circle jerk around Linux. But in the corporate world you find various OS’s for both desktop and servers. I had to support several different OS’s and developed only for two. They all suck in different ways there are no clear winners.
It’s not just a cycley jerk in this case. Worried is dominant for desktop usage but Linux has like 90% of the server market and is used for basically all new server projects.
Paying for Windows licensing when it doesn’t benefit you, it’s silly, and that’s been realized for years.
Web servers, sure, but even companies that manage infrastructure like Google and Amazon have a LOT of Windows servers kicking around for shit like AD, Outlook, Federation, Office/Teams, etc.
Issue is not just on servers, but endpoints also. Servers are something that you can relatively easily fix, because they are either virtualized or physically in same location.
But endpoints you might have thousand physical locations, and IT need to visit all of them (POS, info/commercial displays, IoT sensors etc.).
Parent comment applies even more so to such endpoints imo
My former employer had a bunch of windows servers providing remote desktops for us to access some proprietary (and often legacy) mission critical software.
Part of the security policy was that any machines in the possession of end users were assumed to be untrustworthy, so they kept the applications locked down on the servers.