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Dependency loops are such fun!

My favourite is when some company migrates their physical servers to virtual machines, including the AD domain controllers. Then the next step is to use AD LDAP authentication for the VM management software.

When there's a temporary outage and the VMs don't start up as expected, the admins can't log on and troubleshoot the platform because the logon system was running on it... but isn't now.

The loop is closed.

You see this all the time, especially with system-management software. They become dependent on the systems they're managing, and vice-versa.

If you care about availability at all, make sure to have physical servers providing basic services like DNS, NTP, LDAP, RADIUS, etc...




Or even just have some non-federated/"local" accounts stored in a vault somewhere you can use when the centralized auth isn't working




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