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The company revealed an unusual way to recover from a CrowdStrike crash.
After the recent global crash caused by a failed CrowdStrike software update, Grant Thornton's computers and servers in Australia did not escape the fate of the rest of the world's Windows devices and began to massively issue a blue screen of death (BSOD). The situation affected hundreds of computers and more than 100 servers of the company, and the recovery was predicted to be very long.
The fact is that due to the BitLocker data encryption configured on computers, the company's specialists had to, in addition to the classic system rollback to the checkpoint or delete problematic files from the "C" directory.:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike" in safe mode, additionally enter the 48-digit keys required for BitLocker operation on each computer.
Since the company's fleet is very extensive, it would potentially take forever to recover with massive manual key entry. However, experts came up with a fun life hack, which, in the end, greatly facilitated their lives.
Engineer Rob Volz and infrastructure manager Ben Watson recalled that computers perceive barcode scanners as physical keyboards. Volz suggested creating a script that converts BitLocker keys into barcodes and displays them on the server screen. Scanners could read these barcodes by entering keys automatically.
Volz then purchased a barcode scanner for $ 36 from a nearby stationery store. When computers requested BitLocker keys, the scanner read the barcode from the server screen and inserted it in the required field, which significantly accelerated the recovery process.
The solution was so successful that the Grant Thornton team immediately purchased additional scanners. Already on Monday, July 22, all employees working remotely were asked to bring their computers to the office to connect to scanners. All the company's PCs were restored by lunchtime: each one took no more than 5 minutes. It took longer to restore the servers, about 20 minutes for each one, but the team managed to do this quite quickly.
Watson praised the team's innovative approach, calling their work "a remarkable example of optimizing workstation recovery." In turn, Volz expressed satisfaction with the rapid restoration of the company's work, although he admitted that he could use QR codes to further automate the process. As they say, there is no limit to perfection, but the approach used with barcode scanners also proved to be excellent in the field.
Source
After the recent global crash caused by a failed CrowdStrike software update, Grant Thornton's computers and servers in Australia did not escape the fate of the rest of the world's Windows devices and began to massively issue a blue screen of death (BSOD). The situation affected hundreds of computers and more than 100 servers of the company, and the recovery was predicted to be very long.
The fact is that due to the BitLocker data encryption configured on computers, the company's specialists had to, in addition to the classic system rollback to the checkpoint or delete problematic files from the "C" directory.:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike" in safe mode, additionally enter the 48-digit keys required for BitLocker operation on each computer.
Since the company's fleet is very extensive, it would potentially take forever to recover with massive manual key entry. However, experts came up with a fun life hack, which, in the end, greatly facilitated their lives.
Engineer Rob Volz and infrastructure manager Ben Watson recalled that computers perceive barcode scanners as physical keyboards. Volz suggested creating a script that converts BitLocker keys into barcodes and displays them on the server screen. Scanners could read these barcodes by entering keys automatically.
Volz then purchased a barcode scanner for $ 36 from a nearby stationery store. When computers requested BitLocker keys, the scanner read the barcode from the server screen and inserted it in the required field, which significantly accelerated the recovery process.
The solution was so successful that the Grant Thornton team immediately purchased additional scanners. Already on Monday, July 22, all employees working remotely were asked to bring their computers to the office to connect to scanners. All the company's PCs were restored by lunchtime: each one took no more than 5 minutes. It took longer to restore the servers, about 20 minutes for each one, but the team managed to do this quite quickly.
Watson praised the team's innovative approach, calling their work "a remarkable example of optimizing workstation recovery." In turn, Volz expressed satisfaction with the rapid restoration of the company's work, although he admitted that he could use QR codes to further automate the process. As they say, there is no limit to perfection, but the approach used with barcode scanners also proved to be excellent in the field.
Source
