May Day: I Wish You Well

*The personal is political, but also personal.*

I’ve mentioned before that I do IT and run servers for a living.

And this has been a week for folks in my line of work.

Most significantly, there was a vulnerability announced this week that lets an attacker take administrative control of pretty much every Linux installed in the past nine years, and the people who found it botched the announcement.

They made it public after the core Linux developers had issued a fix for it, but before most Linux distributors had packaged that fix as a system update.

Which means that every Linux sysadmin in the world has spent most of this week manually adjusting machines to mitigate the problem because the system updates to fix it aren’t available yet.

So, yeah, it has been quite a week for sysadmins everywhere.

Between work and personal systems, I’m responsible for a large and varied set of machines, so while the United States has gotten into some truly epic stupid this week that I’ve really wanted to talk about, all my time and thought has been engaged with computery stuff instead.

And while I’m generally in favor of anything that reminds the owning and working classes that power is not entirely in the owners’ hands, I’m gonna be working today instead of downing tools in solidarity.

Because you gotta prioritize.

And no sysadmin working on Internet infrastructure is going to leave a problem like this unfixed unless an actual revolution is happening; symbolic gestures take a back seat.

So, have a thought for all the sysadmins who are still working to keep the systems we all depend on functioning this week, and who will still be working on the fallout from this well into next week too.

You go do May Day without us; we need to deal with this first.

I wish you well.