State of the Spectre/Meltdown emergency: How are sysadmins coping?

[Esther Schindler <esther@bitranch.com>]

I’m planning to write a short article that I’ve tentatively titled, “Coping with Spectre and Meltdown: What Sysadmins are doing.” Could you help me out by answering a few questions?

* What have you done so far to cope with the two massive CPU vulnerabilities? (Applied patches, I guess. Did that fix things or are you still having to deal with this?)

* What are your current activities and short term plans?

* What’s the long term strategy? (E.g. are you talking about buying new servers?)

* And what have you told management to explain all this?

Ideally I’d attribute you by name, company, title. But that isn’t necessary; what matters here is providing readers with relevant advice. So, “Jo, a network admin at a large Midwest insurance firm” is fine, as is “Robin, the CIO and chief bottle-washer at a 70-person training company in Idaho.”  I do _very_ much want to include a few female voices, though; all the responses I’ve gotten so far are from guys!

I hope to be writing the story by end-of-day Monday, so I hope you can respond soon. (On the other hand, I’ve been sick with the flu for the past week, so my grand plans to work on Monday may be overzealous. If you have thoughts I’d love to hear them!)

—Esther 
  twitter.com/estherschindler