> restart required a hardware security module (HSM) smart card.

Out of curiosity, does anyone know why? My guess would be the PW DB would be encrypted with some token generated from this card.

I've had lots of "I have a secret and the server needs it" type problems but I've never been very happy with my solutions- smart cards seem like potentially an elegant solution.

> "At this point, the engineers in Australia decided that a brute-force approach to their safe problem was warranted and applied a power drill to the task. An hour later, the safe was open—but even the newly retrieved cards triggered the same error message."

What happened here (from what I recall) was far funnier than this does it credit.

The SREs first attempted to use a mallet (hammer) on the safe (which they had to first buy from the local hardware store - don't worry it got expensed later), then after multiple rounds of "persuasion" they eventually called in a professional (aka. a locksmith) who used a drill+crowbar to finally liberate the keycard.

The postmortem had fun step by step photos of the safe in various stages of disassembly.

Sorry for the offtopic comment, but it's bizarre to me that Google is hosting their book on Github with a github.io domain. Their previous two SRE books are hosted at https://sre.google on Google-owned IPs.[0]

What was that decision process? "We're Google, and we're literally writing a book about how good we are at hosting services. But hosting some static HTML files that are almost entirely text? That's a tough one. We'd better outsource that to one of our competitors."

[0] https://sre.google/books/

> It took an additional hour for the team to realize that the green light on the smart card reader did not, in fact, indicate that the card had been inserted correctly.

I'm not sure which is worse: bad UI/UX use of lights, or inadequately trained engineers who misunderstood the lights.

What is this, sitcom slapstick? The slapstick of storing the security combination to the safe on the system that is locked by the card which inside the safe; and the slapstick of "You're inserting it wrong"...

What I really like about this story is that Google for all that they are still have normal fallible people just like us behind the scenes.

The power drill mention in the headline is a bit click-baity because in the end while a power drill was used it was unnecessary and was not the solution to the problem. Had they known how to properly use the hardware security devices they had the power drill wouldn't have been deployed at all.