this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
55 points (95.1% liked)

Linux

4945 readers
135 users here now

A community for everything relating to the linux operating system

Also check out [email protected]

Original icon base courtesy of [email protected] and The GIMP

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Ategon
anzo
dwraf_of_ignorance
55
systemd Talks Up Automatic Boot Assessment In Light Of The Crowdstrike-Microsoft Outage (www.phoronix.com)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/linux
20 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In light of the CrowdStrike-Microsoft outage/disaster that has been wreaking havoc on corporate Windows systems around the world since Friday, systemd lead developer Lennart Poettering pointed out how such a situation on Linux systems could be averted by leveraging systemd's Automatic Boot Assessment functionality.

System's Automatic Boot Assessment feature can allow for reverting to a previous version of the OS or kernel automatically when a system consistently fails to boot. With the systemd-boot bootloader and related tooling within systemd and leveraging the Boot Loader Specification, systemd Automatic Boot Assessment would make for much easier recovery in case of an incident like what happened with Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike software last week.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

You could potentially block your network by disabling your router or something, so it couldn't download the bad update, but you'd have to know that was a step to prevent it (which most people didn't until it was too late).

Ostree-based systems are handy for replacing the system layer, but configs live (mostly) in userspace, and they persist.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

Well at that point, just don't install any kernel mode EDR software at all.

NixOS can be set up for impermanence where all config is recreated every boot and nothing persists besides the nix store. There's helpers for ephemeral home also, so you can have something like TailsOS. I'm sure you could do that with other distros but you'd need absolute discipline to have everything the machine needs provisioned at boot.