$58 Idea Solves Windows Crash Problem, Saving Countless Hours of Pain

Last Friday, cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike released a kernel-level update to its software that caused about 8.5 million Windows computers be thrown into an endless loop of the blue screen of death.

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The IT outage was global and affected many aspects of society, such as point-of-sale systems, hospital services, emergency services, airlines, and various businesses. Unfortunately, for systems that had downloaded the update, the only way to implement the fix was to boot the system into Safe Mode and delete the affected files. This means that a person must be physically present to boot the system into Safe Mode.

Grant Thornton Australia, the Australian arm of one of the world’s leading audit, tax and advisory firms, was hit by the CrowdStrike outage. The update took no fewer than 100 servers offline, and IT staff, with countless hours of maintenance ahead, began working to get the servers back online. But senior systems engineer Rob Woltz and infrastructure manager Ben Watson were reminded of the usefulness of barcode scanners.

The company had BitLocker keys for all of its servers, which were then downloaded by engineers and fed into a script that converted them into barcodes. They were then displayed on the desktop of the locked-down management server. The script was written to provide the machine with the necessary barcode, which could then be scanned. Windows recognized the scanned barcode and entered the BitLocker key into the appropriate field.

According to the IT teamthis was much faster than manually entering the BitLocker key for each system. Manual system maintenance took about 20 minutes per machine, and with the barcode method this was reduced to 3-5 minutes per machine. In addition, the barcode scanner cost only AUD 58 or USD 37.