More on the ClownStrike, er, CrowdStrike bugaboo problem

What it really did was demonstrate bad IT practices, or IT shops that put entirely too much faith in their vendors (I could name a couple....)

The best practice for deploying an update is to have a computer lab that is isolated from your user/production network. Push the patch there, see what happens. Have a mix of machines in that environment. And with the proliferation of using virtual machines, it's not hard to do. You can have a mix of servers and workstations and different operating systems. THEN if everything works well there, push it out to a SUBSET of your production network.

Clearly that isn't what a lot of people did. They trust CrowStrike and just blasted it out. After all, it wasn't a code update, it was just like a virus update. What could possibly go wrong?

The problem was the update crashed the CrowdStrike driver, resulting in a blue screen of death upon reboot. And if the machine had an encrypted hard drive, it required manual intervention by IT boffins. All you had to do was delete one little bitty file, but you might not have had access to said little bitty file, particularly if said machine was encrypted.

Everything at the university yesterday seemed fine when I got in to work, no emails from main campus about subsystems being down, so that was nice. And it only affected Microsoft machines. Linux and Mac were safe.

To compound matters, Microsoft had some problems with their Azure cloud service, unrelated to the ClownStrike problem.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/global-microsoft-meltdown-tied-to-bad-crowstrike-update/

Ah, Friday night! So much fun for me today!

Friday night's dinner: leftover pizza from Thursday, plus two pieces of garlic cheese Texas toast.

Not terribly challenging food, right?

Broke a tooth. ON THE TEXAS TOAST!

My right upper 'pre-molar'.

Amazingly, it turned out that my dentist has full hours on Saturday! Even more amazing, they were able to get me in!

And the really cool part? They have a computer-controlled milling machine and MADE ME A NEW TOOTH WHILE I WAS THERE! In and out in 2.5 hours, completely done (unless a problem comes up), and total out of pocket about $375!

I was fortunate in that it didn't cause any hot/cold sensitivity, just pressure, so it wasn't too bad overnight or today before the appointment, and the entire process wasn't too bad, once I was able to wrangle my body into a better position in the chair. I have three fused vertebrae in my neck, and turning my head to the right for a prolonged period of time is a non-starter, but scootching my entire body over and lying more on my right side, that works just fine.

It was a lot less expensive proposition, and simpler solution, that what I was horrifiedly extrapolating in my mind. So that was a good thing. Really, aside from disrupting my entire day, no down side out of it: tooth is fixed, had some really good fish tacos for dinner and brought back some Al Pastor tacos for the spousal unit, picked up some stuff at Target and Sprouts, and got in quite a bit of studying in for my radio license testing over dinner.