Hey, it’s not perfect, but a fix that gets you 10% of the way there is still 10% you don’t have to do by hand. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good, my man.

Fuck yeah. Even better than reimage. That’s creative as fuck and I love it.

From a home user? Probably ain’t shit-all you can do with PXE booting. But if you have a field office or somewhere a user can go with a hardware vpn appliance? Well now you’re in business.

Completely fair, man.

FOG ran on Linux. It wouldn’t have been down. But that’s beside the point.

I never said it was a good answer to CrowdStrike. It was just a story about how I did things 10 years ago, and an option for remotely fixing nonbooting machines. That’s it.

I get you’ve been overworked and stressed as fuck this last few days. I’ve been out of corporate IT for 10 years and I do not envy the shit you guys are going through right now. I wish I could buy you a cup of coffee or a beer or something.

That’s still 15% less work though. If I had to manually fix 1000 computers, clicking a few buttons to automatically fix 150 of them sounds like a sweet-ass deal to me even if it’s not universal.

You could also always commandeer a conference room or three and throw a switch on the table. “Bring in your laptop and go to conference room 3. Plug in using any available cable on the table and reboot your computer. Should be ready in an hour or so. There’s donuts and coffee in conference room 4.” Could knock out another few dozen.

Won’t help for people across the country, but if they’re nearish, it’s not too bad.

Absolutely. 100%

But don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. A fix that gets you 40% of the way there is still 40% less work you have to do by hand. Not everything has to be a fix for all situations. There’s no such thing as a panacea.

How would it not have? You got an office or field offices?

“Bring your computer by and plug it in over there.” And flag it for reimage. Yeah. It’s gonna be slow, since you have 200 of the damn things running at once, but you really want to go and manually touch every computer in your org?

The damn thing’s even boot looping, so you don’t even have to reboot it.

I’m sure the user saved all their data in one drive like they were supposed to, right?

I get it, it’s not a 100% fix rate. And it’s a bit of a callous answer to their data. And I don’t even know if the project is still being maintained.

But the post I replied to was lamenting the lack of an option to remotely fix unbootable machines. This was an option to remotely fix nonbootable machines. No need to be a jerk about it.

But to actually answer your question and be transparent, I’ve been doing Linux devops for 10 years now. I haven’t touched a windows server since the days of the gymbros. I DID say it’s been a decade.

Bro. PXE boot image servers. You can remotely image machines from hundreds of miles away with a few clicks and all it takes on the other end is a reboot.

A decade ago I worked for a regional chain of gyms with locations in 4 states.

I was in TN. When a system would go down in SC or NC, we originally had three options:

1. (The most common) have them put it in a box and ship it to me.
2. I go there and fix it (rare)
3. I walk them through fixing it over the phone (fuck my life)

I got sick of this. So I researched options and found an open source software solution called FOG. I ran a server in our office and had little optiplex 160s running a software client that I shipped to each club. Then each machine at each club was configured to PXE boot from the fog client.

The server contained images of every machine we commonly used. I could tell FOG which locations used which models, and it would keep the images cached on the client machines.

If everything was okay, it would chain the boot to the os on the machine. But I could flag a machine for reimage and at next boot, the machine would check in with the local FOG client via PXE and get a complete reimage from premade images on the fog server.

The corporate office was physically connected to one of the clubs, so I trialed the software at our adjacent club, and when it worked great, I rolled it out company wide. It was a massive success.

So yes, I could completely reimage a computer from hundreds of miles away by clicking a few checkboxes on my computer. Since it ran in PXE, the condition of the os didn’t matter at all. It never loaded the os when it was flagged for reimage. It would even join the computer to the domain and set up that locations printers and everything. All I had to tell the low-tech gymbro sales guy on the phone to do was reboot it.

This was free software. It saved us thousands in shipping fees alone. And brought our time to fix down from days to minutes.

There ARE options out there.

My mom uses those.

Answer: they’re not for fully disabled people. A fully disabled person will have their own. The type of person who needs one can walk for a little bit, stand up sit down, all that; but staying on their feet for the time it takes to grocery shop would be either extremely painful or maybe they’d get really weak and eventually collapse.

As for returning it — either somebody with you returns it or you leave it in the cart corral like any other and the store employees get it later.

Ah, kind of like a Waffle of Indra type situation.

That’s not what a conspiracy is. A conspiracy is a bunch of people working together in secret to do something illegal. A conspiracy theory is when you put a bunch of seemingly random or unrelated facts together and they give the impression of a conspiracy causing something to happen.

You can’t just say “dogs can smell the color blue” and call it a conspiracy theory.

You need to have something to back it up. Even if it’s not hard proof, there needs to be a string of coincidences or suspicious actions or something.

So what makes you think Andrew Tate is an illuminatus? That’s where the meat of a good conspiracy theory is - form your answer to “why do you think that?”

Also the bulbs that last forever are majorly undervolted. They last forever because they’re not run anywhere near their current capacity, and as a result, they emit way less light and their filament doesn’t degrade as fast.

If you take any old off the shelf incandescent bulb and only run it at 50v, it’ll last decades.

Actually, come to think of it, it’s not just toasters… it’s coffeemakers, microwaves, stove knobs, thermostats…

HE’S SUPPORTED BY BIG BIMETALLIC STRIP!

Then why are the employees at one Waffle House near me always high, but another near me across town is normal? Well… normal as Waffle House gets, anyway.

Dude… write a book. This would be a great plot to a thriller novel.

I…. Uh….

This makes way more sense than any other crackpot 911 theory I’ve ever heard.

What if was less a structural weakness than actual demolition charges built into the superstructure of the building that few knew about that could be used in just such an event?

Different materials burn at different temperatures, and a raging inferno near the top wouldn’t affect structural members near the bottom, so a fire might not be guaranteed to trigger the weakness, but charges could be placed to guarantee the outcome if the worst happened.

Would explain SO much of the “evidence” that 911 conspiracy theorists talk about - the smell of chordite, the flashes in the windows, the clean collapse, that whole “the decision was made to ‘pull’ [building 7]” but no way they could have placed charges that quickly in that situation thing…

Then, this begs the question - What other structures might be similarly equipped?

That’s fair. I can get behind a neutral view of it.

Now there’s a conspiracy theory I can get behind. He’s financed by big toaster.