Hacker News Reader

Comment by belter | Hacker News Reader

It's not the first time they pull something similar...1 month ago: "CrowdStrike bug maxes out 100% of CPU, requires Windows reboots" - https://www.thestack.technology/crowdstrike-bug-maxes-out-10...

75 Billion dollars valuation, CNBC Analysts praising the company this morning on how well the company is run!...When in reality they can't master the most basic of the phased deployment methodologies known for 20 years...

Hundreds of handsomely paid CTO's, at companies with billions of dollars in valuations, critical healthcare, airlines, who can't master the most basic of the concepts of "Everything fails all the time"...

This whole industry is depressing....

View on HN

> This whole industry is depressing....

I'll take it a step further and say that every industry is depressing when it comes to computers at scale.

Rather than build efficient, robust, fault-tolerant, deterministic systems built for correctness, we somehow manage to do the exact opposite. We have zettabytes and exaflops at our fingertips, and yet, we somehow keep making things slower. Our user interfaces are noisier than ever, and our helpdesks are less helpful than they used to be.

Exactly! :(

I am drifting towards hating to turn on my computer in the morning. The whole day is like pissing into the wind, trying to find workaround of annoyances or even malfunctions, getting rid of obstructive noise from all direction, my productivity using modern computer systems is diminishing compared to where it was just mere 10-15 years ago (still better than 25 years ago not only becuase of experience but also the access of information on demand). Very depressing. I should have became a farmer perhaps.

What I find definitely depressing is the fact we used to roll out progressively even OS upgrades (I guess now that is done through intune?) and was one point in favor of windows (on Linux you had to do things yourself at the time AFAIK, I don't think the situation has improved much).

Nowadays we get mandated random software upgrading at once on the entire company fleet and no one bats an eye - I counted more than a dozen agents installed for "security" and "monitoring" purposes in my previous company servers, many of those with hooks in the kernel obviously, and many of those installed with random policies to tick yet another compliance box...

> (on Linux you had to do things yourself at the time AFAIK, I don't think the situation has improved much)

You can schedule the updates any time you want, want to do it staggered then configure that, want to do it all at the same time then do that, want it with a random interval also possible. I don't see the "you need to do everything yourself" option as much as any managed environment.

Centralized management is very useful, just a random delay is not enough. One of the (big) companies I worked with had jury rigged something with chef I believe to show different machines different "repositories" and roll things out progressively (1% of the fleet, 5%...).

I haven't been a sys admin in a very long time so my systems knowledge might be outdated, but I reckon functionality like intune's built-in monitoring of specific feature install failures would make a huge difference with a few dozen systems, let alone the hundreds of thousands you see in some of today's deployments. It's not like that stuff isn't possible on Linux, but if you're coordinating more than a few systems, that turns into a big, expensive project pretty quickly.

Staggering is necessary in some cases. I've heard of scenarios where a company has lots of devices in the field which all simultaneously try to download a big update, and DDOS the servers hosting that update.

This borked our dispatch/911 call center then as well. However, it wasn't as bad as this one. This outage put our entire public safety system into the stone age and with that we were at stone age efficiency.

I work IT at a regional 911 center. We're fine but I sympathize with those who are back to pen and paper dispatching. Hard for most current dispatchers to realize the way we did it back in the day.

The worst part is that nobody will be held accountable. A F up like this should wipe out the entire company but instead everyone will just shrug it off as an opposie a few low level employees will get punished and nothing will change.

Those "CNBC analysts" truly know nothing, especially when it comes to tech. They're just cheerleaders who repeat talking points all days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com