|
How many patches will you apply while the turkey is cooking? |
|
|
|
Sunday, 21 November 2004 |
There's an interesting discussion about the holiday tech support obligations of the computer savvy. This may be the toughest holiday season yet for nerds headed home.
I'm starting to wonder how much longer the non-nerd home computer user can survive. I just spent the afternoon patching my father in-law's desktop and laptop and he's more knowledgeable than most. The number and variability of patches is astounding - windows update, reboot, windows update again, reboot, update scanner driver to work with SP2, reboot, update ad-aware, perform full system scan, reboot, install spybot, update spybot, full scan, reboot. Then start all over again on the laptop.
The other day a co-worker brought up a fresh install of Windows Server 2003. First trip to windows update - 27 patches.
Last week at work one user complained of getting prompted every day to install the same patch. We use SUS server and domain policies to keep computers on our network up to date. After a fruitless attempt to manually install the patch, a bit of googling turned up this conversation. Of course! A simple matter of a cumulative patch superseding all the patches before it, then a second cumulative patch superseding the first, and yet another cumulative patch superseding the second. This poor user got stuck somewhere in the middle. Of course, SUS is supposed to sort all that out, but I guess it needs a patch.
Powered by AkoComment 2.0! and SecurityImage 3.0.4 |
