throwaway3306a

What I meant when I said reinstall the PCs was to reinstall the critical computers necessary for operation of medical machinery to make basic and still mostly manual/paper based operation possible, not every computer they have there. I really don't think they have hundreds of computers necessary for operations of MRIs and other machines.

You misunderstood me, I am easily convinced that this is the case - what I don't get is how they could let it be the case.

I talked to people in charge of the operations on a daily basis for years. I really don't think these considerations have changed that much since my times of leadership of an entire department managing just that.

It's pretty obvious they meant the material possessions. Isn't it in guidelines to look for the more charitable options?

Yes, they wouldn't be considered doing the Linux stuff in a professional capacity.

Things haven't changed in IT so much. I am not in ICT management anymore, but I write software for the modern enterprise systems and networks - I'm reasonably up to date.

Ad medicine - hence my question, I'd really like to know what's the blocker. So far it seems the blocker is bad IT management, regulation and liability, not impossibility to perform the treatment.

They are people. They are entitled to everything every other human is entitled to. Including being idiots.

Are they trying to help any cause other than their own? Also - don't generalize based on nationality, please. These behave like this, others behave differently. This changes nothing about the war in Ukraine or Ukrainians.

You're free to donate money to Ukraine yourself. They didn't ask to be born there or to be in that situation.

I live in a country with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees just living their new lives, working - and spending the money, sometimes a lot of it for expensive apartments, nice cars, luxury meals etc. Are all of them bad just because they don't want to be responsible for the state when they didn't sign up for that and nobody paid them to do so? I really don't think so. They are people like you and me, they want to live a happy life. Some contribute to the defense effort, some don't, both is fine.

It's not like your bank account immediately stops working when you cross the border. There are people who had successful careers finding themselves in this situation, is their story not valid just because they also weren't completely broke? It's not actionable advice (is this even advice?) for someone with zero on their bank account, but why should it?

I expect the local admins to be able to install a fresh OS not connected to the enterprise network. And I expect them to have physical copies of stuff like disk encryption keys, also backups of OS installations and images, and all critical software. If they don't have that or can't use it during an outage, the problem is incompetent IT management that has no business running a hospital, not CrowdStrike. Something else would take them out sooner or later.

Again, we had all of this for a forest logging operation - is it too much to expect at a hospital?

If it's stuck in a boot loop, the first thing I do is call the local admins and tell them to take a fresh SSD and a Windows installation USB drive with them. Plug the new SSD, reinstall the OS and copy the files from the old one. Computer running in less than an hour.

That's literally what we did to restart our forest logging machinery. Are human lives less critical than that?

I have trouble accepting that. Even if they had to unplug the computer from the network and disable SSO and antivirus in safe mode, it's possible to get the computer operational. Even if they had to reinstall the OS and the critical software from scratch. There are solutions, the question is - did they even try? If not, why? And is CrowdStrike really to blame if they didn't? I just don't think so.

What if it turns out they harmed the patient by insisting on following the standard procedure during a worldwide outage? Isn't that the same kind of liability risk, and is the regulation really going to protect them in this case? If so, isn't that a hugely problematic regulation?

So the problem really isn't CrowdStrike or any computer at all, but dumb policy or regulation?