Comment on An angry admin shares the CrowdStrike outage experience

• save_the_humans@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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 they way things are generally done on, and the philosophy of, Linux could very well have avoided this catastrophe.

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  • stephen01king@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Can you explain what is immutable/atomic distribution and how it can prevent this?

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    • captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      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.

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    • save_the_humans@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      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.

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• jabjoe@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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.

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• flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  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.

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  • pathief@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Just to clarify: the world runs in linux servers. The market share for the non-server market is abysmal.

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    • jabjoe@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      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.

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      • pathief@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        I don’t know too much about IoT but I wouldn’t 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.

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  • theonyltruemupf@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    🐧: what is my purpose? 🧑‍💼: you run web servers 🐧: oh my god

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    • EdgelDil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I appreciate that rick and morty ref

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• kalleboo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  The Linux kernel has a special kernel extension scheme specifically to keep software like CloudStrike from crashing it 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)

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