Everyone was locked out in a building am staying at (40 something stories) for several hours. When I asked the concierge if I can have a look at the system, it turns out they had none. The whole thing communicated with AWS for some subscription SaaS that provided them with a front-end to register/block cards. And every tap anywhere (elevators/doors/locks) in the building communicated back with this system hosted on AWS. Absolute nightmare.

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exikyut 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I wonder what happened to the building when us-east-1 went down.

	▲	Ekaros 22 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Now I am waiting for time when they move us-east-1 physical security to run in us-east-1... Thus locking themselves out when needing some physical intervention on servers to get backup.
	▲	csomar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is in SEA. They probably operate from ap-southeast-1 or 2. But yeah, if the internet goes down, the provider service goes down or AWS goes down they are cooked.

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sofixa an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Absolute nightmare.

Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.

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potato3732842 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

>than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.), and have someone deploy, install, manage, update, etc. all of that.

You don't need any of that. You need one more box in the electrical closet and one password protected wifi for all the crap in the building (the actual door locks and the like) to connect to.

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Nextgrid 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> with redundant power, cooling, etc

The doors the system controls don't have any of this. Hell, the whole building doesn't have any of this. And it definitely doesn't have redundant internet connections to the cloud-based control plane.

This is fear-mongering when a passive PC running a container image on boot will suffice plenty. For updates a script that runs on boot and at regular intervals that pulls down the latest image with a 30s timeout if it can't reach the server.

	▲	onli 21 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		What updates? That would be on a local network and have no internet connection, if done right.
	▲	Telemakhos 10 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		You know what else would suffice plenty? Physical keys and mechanical locks. They worked (and still work) without electricity. The tech is mature and well-understood.
	▲	lazide 20 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Those devices can be trivially power cycled, and won’t have as many issues with dodgy power. Some PC somewhere with storage is a bigger problem.

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csomar 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The system was not built with resiliency in mind and had no care/considerations for what a shit-show will unfurl once the system or the link goes down. I wonder if exit is regulated (you can still fully exit the building from any point using the green buttons and I think these are supposed to activate/still work even if electricity is down).

> Yes, but still probably a million times easier for both the building management and the software vendor to have a SaaS for that, than having to buy hardware to put somewhere in the building (with redundant power, cooling, etc.)

A isolated building somewhere in the middle of the jungle dependent for its operation on some American data-center hundreds of miles away is simply negligence. I am usually against regulations but clearly for certain things we can trust that all humans will be reasonable.

	▲	HWR_14 a minute ago \| parent [-]
		In the US, the answer is that exit would have to work in the event that AWS is down or power is out. Some exceptions exist for special cases.