In the space of a fortnight Europe got hacked freezers in hundreds of supermarkets, thirty-odd hoax bomb threats on airliners, and a British government telling families to keep three days of food and water at home. It all looked like one story. I spent days trying to work out whether it is – and the answer is: partly, and not in the way it looks.

Tuesday morning, 9 AM. After a routine patching session, a long-standing ZFS storage system running Solaris 11 suddenly stops talking to its Windows 10 clients. The culprit is the usual, maddening SMB dialect dance: Windows pushes for SMB 3 on security grounds, while Solaris's native service struggles through the negotiation. Two days of banging my head against the wall – hard – and then the discovery: OpenCSW. A community that maintains updated packages for Solaris where the vendor long since threw in the towel. Updated libraries, sorted dependencies, problem solved. There are volunteers out there patching critical systems better than the official vendor ever did. Worth knowing.