Originally posted by Irwink!
Even though its written for the professional IT person, official MS course texts instruct one to never install a Windows update without first having tested it in a non-production environment.
Do they think I should buy another Server 2003 license for "non-production environment"? And do they think server hardware grows upon trees? So they wand me to have 2 exact hardware copies of each server, one "non-production" and another "combat" version?!
For us it's easier to make a complete server backup on Friday night and then play with updates on weekend, at least once in a month.
Originally posted by Irwink!
That's hard to do for the typical home user. Many networks use Windows Software Update Service on a server to dish out only those updates to clients that an administrator has approved first. WSUS is a free MS product that they advise IT people to use to dspense updates. MS states that it is the "best practice" to put WSUS between Windows Updates and downstream clients to prevent just such problems on client systems. If you're going to use Windows Automatic Updates at least configure to download but NOTIFY before install. That way if you select "custom" install you get a chance to look at each update and elect then whether or not to install it.
I have read a lot about that WSUS stuff, mostly questions and no answers, like 150 forum pages of !@#%%^!!!! . Another piece of M$ junk. We got SUSFL instead, at least under Linux you can understand what goes wrong (if it does).
Digging a little deeper into MS servers I think I got more grey hair in my beard. A SharePoint Portal/Project Server combination was written by aliens... If you properly link Proj Server with SP - MS update simply stops working.
