dan

I know that Windows is everywhere, I just don’t know the percentage of Windows computers that run Crowdstrike.

Makes sense - thanks for the details.

Permanent records, please.

The issue with this is that a lot of companies have a retention policy that only retains emails for a particular period, after which they’re deleted unless there’s a critical reason why they can’t be (eg to comply with a legal hold). It’s common to see 2, 3 or 5 year retention policies.

Could you just revert VMs to a snapshot before the update? Or do you not take periodic snapshots? You could probably also mount the VM’s drive on the host and delete the relevant file that way.

I feel sorry for sys admins that have to administer servers in a remote data center and don’t have KVM over IP.

Oh yeah, that’s the other thing I forgot to mention. Make sure the mark is legit.

In general, branded products that are an actual brand (not some Amazon special) and have good reviews should be okay.

Their drives are good quality and work well. I just don’t want to give them any money after they intentionally misled customers :)

I’m in the USA and bought two brand new Seagate Exos “X20” 20TB drives for around $250 each last year. One from Newegg and one from ServerPartDeals. Normal price is over $350, but I’m sure they’ll be on sale again at some point.

Any brands that make devices that plug into mains power that aren’t UL or ETL certified. I’ve seen way too many cases where people buy generic smart switches with no certification and they trip the circuit breaker or catch fire due to poor quality construction. Certification isn’t perfect, but it’s way better than products not being certified.

This might be an unpopular opinion but I avoid Western Digital hard drives after their two recent issues:

• In 2020, they silently started selling SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drives as NAS drives, without labeling them as such, even though they’re not appropriate for use in a NAS. They can get very slow and cause issues during RAID rebuilds. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/wd-fesses-up-some-red-hdds-use-slow-smr-tech

• In 2023, they started flagging drives with a warning just because they had been powered on for three years (26,280 hours), even if all the SMART data was fine. The “fix” was updating systems like Synology to totally ignore WD’s alerting (WDDA) and only use SMART. I think the warnings are still present, but NAS software just ignores them now. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/

Both were intentional changes to try and increase profits.

I’m using Seagate Exos drives, which are the same price or even cheaper than WD Red Pro drives, when on sale.

Are there really a billion systems in the world that run Crowdstrike? That seems implausible. Is it just hyperbole?