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Comment by Sebb767 | Hacker News Reader

Having the badge system work from a single point has a lot of advantages for a company like FB: HR can update info from everywhere (they might not be in the same office), you can immediately deny or block a card everywhere, you have an audit log etc.. They're not having this for fun.

Akso, it's likely not on an fb subdomain, but something like office.security.fb-infra.com (example). It just happens to be that fb-infra.com is using the Facebook DNS server.

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It's still possible to design a badge system on an independent network (think just switched within a building) which syncs a local copy of the authoritative ldap from the corp domain, so your badge readers stay working if the link to the corp domain goes away.

It's just more expensive and another thing to maintain, and still doesn't account for _all_ failure modes (what if you sync really frequently and a bad change was made deleting all accounts?)

Sure, this fits under the "few actual reasons" but think for a moment: does it make sense that access to a building is controlled only (keyword here) through a centralized location somewhere? Some DB who knows where? With no fallback?

You might need a break-glass account/badge somewhere. Sure, the angle-grinder works, but probably cost you 2h maybe?

> it's likely not on an fb subdomain, but something like office.security.fb-infra.com

Thanks, yeah, makes sense

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