this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59566 readers
3555 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
On Monday I will once again be raising the point of not automatically updating software. Just because it's being updated does not mean it's better and does not mean we should be running it on production servers.
Of course they won't listen to me but at least it's been brought up.
I'm thought it was a security definition download; as in, there's nothing short of not connecting to the Internet that you can do about it.
Well I haven't looked into it for this piece of software but essentially you can prevent automatic updates from applying to the network. Usually because the network is behind a firewall that you can use to block the update until you decide that you like it.
Also a lot of companies recognize that businesses like to check updates and so have more streamlined ways of doing it. For instance Apple have a whole dedicated update system for iOS devices that only businesses have access to where you can decide you don't want the latest iOS and it's easy you just don't enable it and it doesn't happen.
Regardless of the method, what should happen is you should download the update to a few testing computers (preferably also physically isolated from the main network) and run some basic checks to see if it works. In this case the testing computers would have blue screened instantly, and you would have known that this is not an update that you want on your system. Although usually requires a little bit more investigation to determine problems.
It makes me so fuckdamn angry that people make this assumption.
This Crowdstrike update was NOT pausable. You cannot disable updates without disabling the service as they get fingerprint files nearly every day.
I hear you, but there's no reason to be angry.
When I first learned of the issue, my first thought was, "Hey our update policy doesn't pull the latest sensor to production servers." After a little more research I came to the same conclusion you did, aside from disconnecting from the internet there's nothing we really could have done.
There will always be armchair quarterbacks, use this as an opportunity to teach, life's too short to be upset about such things.
It doesn't help that I'm medically angry 80% of the time for mostly no reason, but even without that this would incense me because I've had 40+ users shouting similar uneducated BS at me yesterday thinking that it was personally my fault that 40% of the world bluescreened. No I am not exaggerating.
I have written and spoken phrases 'No we could not prevent this update' so many times in the last 24 hours that they have become meaningless to me through semantic satiation.
Thank God someone else said it. I was constantly in an existential battle with IT at my last job when they were constantly forcing updates, many of which did actually break systems we rely on because Apple loves introducing breaking changes in OS updates (like completely fucking up how dynamic libraries work).
Updates should be vetted. It's a pain in the ass to do because companies never provide an easy way to rollback, but this really should be standard practice.
You can use AirWatch to deal with Apple devices. Although it is a clunky program it does at least give you the ability to roll things back.