Tai’shar Malkier!

Good luck with that. .local is reserved for mDNS calls, and not every OS treats it the same way. Ask me how I know.

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.

I bought a cheap used Dell R710 on Facebook marketplace for like $100 or so, as well as an ups, rack, 10g switch, etc, from various other sellers. All told, I’ve got about $500 in my server setup.

Installed proxmox on it. It’s “free” if you don’t buy a license. You just have to put up with a little nag screen when you open the control panel but it still works 100%, much like winrar.

Works great.

Edit: just realized this is in c/selfhosted AND I misunderstood the post. I’m gonna leave it here just on the off chance it’s useful to somebody, but I acknowledge it’s not what you’re looking for.

And I was making a joke about the D&D spider goddess.

But the word is “loath,” which has an accepted alternate spelling of “loth”. “Lolth” is the Dungeons and Dragons spider goddess, commonly worshiped by Drow.

What? This is system programming, not web development.

FWIW, I run proxmox at home, and I friggin love it. It’s really not hard at all.

I went on facebook marketplace and bought a pretty beefy decommissioned half-size rack. I think it’s about 18U or 20U. It’s even got wheels and came with a patch panel. I think I paid like $80 for it. Also bought a 1500VA rack-mount UPS from the same guy on the same trip.

The thing’s been a dream. I mean… apart from having to run to a harbor freight to buy a drill so I could drill out a few rivets and disassemble it to fit it into the back of my mazda because my truck was out of commission.

My advice though, is to make sure your rack is built for what you’re putting on it. Don’t use a two-post, non-floor-mounted rack for a heavy-ass UPS and servers, for instance. Likewise don’t use one of those wall-mounted network gear racks for heavy equipment. Get a 4-post or cabinet style rack. Check your local marketplaces. Be ready to make a drive if you need to. I drove 4 hours to go pick up the UPS and rack because it was perfect and a great deal.