An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience
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 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.
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.
My thought was mostly that this kind of invasive third party and closed source kernel module security wouldn't have been necessary. But I'm pretty sure rollbacks can include kernel changes in a previous image.
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.
The Linux kernel has a special kernel extension scheme specifically to keep software like CloudStrike from crashing it https://ebpf.io/what-is-ebpf/ This is supported by CloudStrike on recent versions of Linux (if you're running an older version, then yes CloudStrike still has the ability to ruin your day)
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.
Just to clarify: the world runs in linux servers. The market share for the non-server market is abysmal.
Except lots of IoT things, router, etc. Also Cromebooks and Steamdecks. And us GNU/Linux people. Android is Linux, just not GNU/Linux. Really isn't just servers.
I don't know too much about IoT but I wouldn't say linux runs the world in any of the other markets you mentioned.
I would say while technically Android uses a modified linux kernel, you can't put it under the same umbrella.
Either way I don't want to get too much into these technicalities. I was simply trying to say that Linux is king on servers, not really on the market where all this crazyness happened.
Android makes RMS's GNU/Linux language make sense. It is a Linux, but not a GNU/Linux.
Google's attempt to fork Linux failed and now is mainlined so they can maintain as small a set of patches as they can. Once binder was merged, there is no fork anymore.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/android?h=v6.10
Android is basically a build config now.
TVs that aren't Android are probably GNU/Linux. Smart white goods are often Linux. Linux even get used in cars. Some of it under Automotive Grade Linux, but not all. If some random thing has a user interface, find licenses and you can normally see what FOSS went in.
You can do so much with so little, at no cost of licencing or access. Why wouldn't you?
You use things like Yocto and Buildroot to build a image that has nothing but what you need, how you need it.
Alpine Linux tho 😈 /j
Not quite the same thing. I doubt, for example, they have a big bag of device trees for different ARM devices to build from.
🐧: what is my purpose?
🧑💼: you run web servers.
🐧: oh my god
I appreciate that rick and morty ref