Month: May 2004

Man oh man doesn’t it just suck when you work so hard on automating your Patch Management infrastructure and its someone else’s software configuration screwing up that is causing you headaches. Again this month reports of peoples Security Update Bulletin Catalog (MSSECURE.CAB) aren’t downloading the latest copy. This is due to ISP’s caching the old one. Unfortunately the only way to fix is to call up your ISP, tell them to clear the cache, and tell them (try and be nice) to stop caching going forward. Now….I know there are a lot of smart fellers up there in Redmond. A … Continue reading Uggghhhh!!!!! My Sync Tool isn’t working either!!!!

Craig from the SMS Product Group started a new blog.  Great to see a member of the SMS team blogging.  Maybe we can convince some more to come out of hiding <g>

Thinking about feature sets in products, its really evident that there will always be give and take on both ends. How much is to much though? Back in the day SMS Administrators used to have a pretty rough time creating big packages for patch management. There was detection of the OS, seeing which updates were needed, installing the proper ones, verifying that they were installed, etc, etc, etc. What a pain that was. I find myself asking though – are we better off having simplicity given by Microsoft into the product if the accuracy is lower than using our in-house … Continue reading Reaction Times

A lot of discussion goes into TCO for organizations.  Choosing this Management product over this other one because it does X,Y, and Z while the other only does X and Y will produce a lower TCO.  Running this Operating System as opposed to this other one will give you a lower TCO in this scenario.  Who came up with this new age version of Voodoo Economics?  IT departments need to constantly get feedback from their user community as to what they need to do their jobs better.  They should actually be going out of their ways to learn the daily … Continue reading Bogus TCO

Looks like we’ve got another worm on our hands.  Many Administrators are getting sleep tonight because they know their systems have been patched for a bit now.  They have set up the proper processes and/or technologies throughout the enterprise to be proactive and patch before something like this happens.  But what about those Administrators that haven’t patched their systems yet (this isn’t necessarily a failure on an Administrators part but could have been a political, business, or other issue that caused this) and are stuck fighting the worm? There are good practices and procedures that should be followed for remediation … Continue reading Throwing Water on the Fire