$58 idea solves Windows outage problem saving countless painful hours

Last Friday, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike issued an update to its kernel-level software that caused approximately 8.5 million Windows PCs to be thrown into infinite blue screen of death boot loops.

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The IT outage was global, impacting multiple facets of society, such as point-of-sale systems, hospital services, emergency services, airlines, and various businesses. Unfortunately, for the systems that downloaded the update, the only way to implement a fix was to boot it into Safe Mode and delete the faulty files. This means an individual must be physically present to boot the system into Safe Mode.

Grant Thornton Australia, the Australian arm of one of the world's leading assurance, tax and advisory firms, was hit by the CrowdStrike outage. No less than 100 servers were knocked out of service by the update, and facing an untold number of maintenance hours ahead of them, the IT staff there began work on bringing the servers back online. However, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz and infrastructure manager Ben Watson remembered the utility of barcode scanners.

The firm had the BitLocker keys for all of its servers, which were then taken by engineers and fed into a created script that converted them into barcodes. These were then displayed on a locked-down management server's desktop. The script was written to provide a machine with the necessary barcode that could then be scanned. Windows recognized the scanned barcode and inputted the BitLocker key into the applicable field.

According to the IT team, this was much faster than manually typing out the BitLocker key for each system. Manual system maintenance was around 20 minutes per machine, and with the barcode method it was reduced down to anywhere between 3 and 5 minutes per machine. Furthermore, the barcode scanner only cost $58AUD or $37USD.

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