Yelp, thanks Microsoft - a day of MS08-067 hell

[Stolly]

This one is been taken very seriously, the place has been in a state of near panic since Friday and over the weekend.

This must be costing thousands at the place i am at, whole teams stopping what they were doing and moving onto getting this patch on. Its not the installation thats the problem, its the reboot thats the pain. Some boxes just don't have outage windows....

Anyone else in a patch frenzy ?

 

[Stolly]

Thanks Microsoft for fixing a serious security flaw so quickly.

Also, if it is costing your organisation thousands, you have a lousy IT infrastructure and you suck.

lol, well when you have 20k+ wintel servers and 100k+ desktops the people rolling out the out of band patch will want paying, hence the cost.

Not all can be auto-deployed due to the nature of what they do, and there will a percentage casualty rate, and its the reboot thats the problem.

 

[Stolly]

Yeah and we deployed to every public facing server for a FTSE100 company (I'm less concerned about internal servers for now) with zero interruption to service, if you have that many servers and don't have clustering, NLB or hardware load balancing you need to fire the person who designed that as a priority.

Hundreds of clusters, but not every server can be clustered because ultimately the customers won't pay for it.

 

[Stolly]

Then they accept downtime as a result when work has to be done surely. You can't say 'no downtime' and then refuse to pay for resiliency.

Customers say the craziest things don't they ?

 

[Stolly]

Do the reboot remotely, at night or in the morning?

Thats whats been done here, since many of the support teams are 24/7/365 but there is only a certain number of hours per night and thousands of servers to do....and some as it turns out were not on 2003 Sp1 due to various reasons so thats another complication...

Anyway, its pretty much done now, not a bad effort really.