Response to Meltdown and Spectre

[Paul Pathiakis]

On 02/03/2018 20:00, Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2018-02-03, "Valeri Galtsev" <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
>> With all due respect, one person saying, it didn't affect me, doesn't
>> prove it is not disastrous for somebody else. Even if it is one machine
>> out of thousand that is "bricked" for some time, it is a disaster for
>> sysadmin who has that machine as a production server
> Of course, but who at all is saying that Intel's microcode updates
> have "bricked" any machines?  This appears to be an entirely spurious
> claim, based on nothing other than grievous exaggeration that turns
> "higher system reboots" into "bricked". You guys are talking each
> other into a frenzy of fear over nothing.
>
I would say we are not panicking in any manner.  Nor are we in a 
frenzy.  Real sysadmins are cautious on everything/anything that can 
affect the availability of the machines.  Any machine that is 
'unreliable' is 'bricked' or 'near-bricked' to us.  It causes a major 
question about availability of the machine.  If Intel's patch hadn't 
immediately caused issues, it may have caused something that might not 
have been caught after it was rolled out to farms (aka 1000s) of 
machine.   What then?

There was a similar issue in the UK (I have since forgotten the name of 
the data center owner) about 8 (or more) years regarding fujitsu hard 
drives.  The data center was doing an excellent job of tracking hard 
drive replacement every five years.  Fujitsu gave a great bid and 
shipped the drives..... After less than 6 months, the drives started to 
fail.  All the drives needed to be replaced after they had just replaced 
all the drives a few months previous.  The company almost went under.

It's that simple in the world of a sysadmins in charge of a large number 
of systems.

Had that patch been rolled out to thousands and failed months later.....

P.