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Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for August 20th, 2024

Some lessons to learn from the CrowdStrike debacle

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/20

About a month from International CrowdStruck Day, just a few thoughts, more likely to follow:

  • How well does your infrastructure behave when none of your Windows machines can boot?
  • How well is your out-of-band management?
  • How well is your CMDB doing key management, for instance for BitLocker encryption?
  • Is checkbox compliance more important than a single point of failure?
  • Can you ensure all updates from your supply chain are staggered/staged/phased with a kill switch when things get out of hand?
  • Are the worst case scenarios in your disaster recovery plans really the worst?
  • Do you understand the human factor of large scale outages (both of the people that – often indirectly – triggered them – hello #HupOps – and the ones that cannot work because of them)?
  • Do you value your people – especially the ones that pulled you out of this situation – enough, and did you rename your Human Resource department into something that is more friendly to your people?
  • Do you realise this could have happened on any of the platforms you use, including Linux and MacOS?
  • If you were mentioned in the media by not recovering well, do you have any idea how much a target you will be from adversaries?
  • Did CrowdStrike finally show some real postmortem instead of the half-hearted communications they did mostly after the weekend following the debacle?
  • How does your organisation perform dates of critical files?
  • Would other platforms be less or more risky? If so: why?
  • Will eBPF solve most of this, or at least centralise the issues and what consequences would that have?

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Posted in Configuration Management, DevOps, HugOps, Infrastructure, Power User, Windows | Leave a Comment »

Smart idea: (re)use a solar panel as balcony power plant table

Posted by jpluimers on 2024/08/20

Still to do for Michael: put the inverter on the underside of the table-top.

[Wayback/Archive] Michael Eberhard on Twitter: “Nachdem wir eh einen neuen Tisch auf unserer Dachterrasse brauchten, gibt es nun einen Balkonkraftwerk-Tisch. Bloß der Wechselrichter muss noch unter der Tischplatte verträumt werden.”

The picture is below; this is the part list: [Wayback/Archive] Michael Eberhard on Twitter: “@TuckiTina @MatthiasVialon AlphaSolar Komplettpaket ca. 500€ Ikea Tischbeine 60€ Holz aus dem Bestand.” / Twitter

  • AlphaSolar full system ~500€
  • Ikea Table legs ~60€
  • Spare wood

Yield is not bad: [Wayback/Archive] Michael Eberhard on Twitter: “@truewhitemount Ich habe einen einfachen Zähler dazwischen. Gerade jetzt produziert der Tisch zwischen 180 und 230 Watt. In Summe bin ich im den letzten Tagen auf 0,6 – 0,8 kWh pro Tag gekommen. Noch ist die Motivation da, jeden Abend den Zähler abzulesen…” / Twitter

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Posted in Development, DIY, Electronics Development, Hardware Development, IKEA hacks, LifeHacker, Power User, Solar Power | Leave a Comment »