4 ms·

> I'd rather try to build a four story brick building with horse dung for masonry mortar, than run my backend on windows boxes. How many cumulative hours of hor

> I'd rather try to build a four story brick building with horse dung for masonry mortar, than run my backend on windows boxes. How many cumulative hours of horror has Windows Update unleashed on the human race? +1 War story: an ex-client of mine was on a different continent demoing a product (involving a physical device talking to a software backend hosted by a partner company) at a neutral site to a potential new customer. Months and months of talks and prep, dry run demos in the weeks before, everyone was quietly confident. Scope for selling lots and lots of these devices if the demo goes well, but the marketspace is fairly ruthless. Minutes before the team are due to present, a sudden and total comms loss between the device and the backend. Cue frantic calls which due to the time zones even involved getting the CEO of the partner company out of bed. Minutes ticking by.. Potential customer not impressed, said: you have ten minutes, after that we're leaving. As the potential customer was walking out of the building, the partner company finally tracked down the issue. Windows Update, on a backend database server.

buran77 4y ago
In all honesty you should rarely (if ever) patch or reboot all Prod servers in a single wave. No matter how much testing you think you've done in your development or pre-production environments something will still surprise you in prod and that costs more. Always and without exception, no matter what OS or software you use, make sure that after a patching cycle (or impactful change) you have a chunk of your environment untouched and still fully functioning. There will be situations where you can't, special cases where you're left with few options. If the system is that critical have 2 of everything (clusters, databases, etc.) in a way where the mirror can stay untouched and keep your business going. And if it needs saying, something like updates or reboots should never happen truly automatically (as in the software decided when or if to do it). A human should decide how to automate that and have full control over when and if it happens.
justsomehnguy 4y ago
I don't remember any server systems to reboot for updates if not configured to do so. And I've seen enough WinSvr in my life. Probably nobody consulted a sysadmin when they designed the system. *grin* Windows 10 behaviour is another story, but I would always stand on what it's a self-inflicted wound - people blamed MS for not updating soon enough... while disabling or postponing updates for literally years. MS acted. Poorly, yes, because by that time it ascended to General Motors levels of bureaucracy[0], but again - this is another story. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  That's the thing I notice when I see people complaining about Windows choosing to update itself: I get the feeling people just don't want to reboot their machine for five minutes every week. For at least 80% of the comments I read, I'm pretty sure these people would never apply updates if they had the opportunity to. Sure, Windows update takes a while, but it's still so much better than whatever the hell Apple is doing. Despite the fact that I abhor removing the possibility to choose what your device does when, I think forced automatic updates are net win for computer users worldwide. In fact, I suspect Microsoft may need to be even more forceful, because even though consumer Windows rebooted itself at the time, wannacry and friends still managed to spread across the globe using an exploit that had been patched in an important security updates months before.

buran77 4y ago

In all honesty you should rarely (if ever) patch or reboot all Prod servers in a single wave. No matter how much testing you think you've done in your development or pre-production environments something will still surprise you in prod and that costs more. Always and without exception, no matter what OS or software you use, make sure that after a patching cycle (or impactful change) you have a chunk of your environment untouched and still fully functioning. There will be situations where you can't, special cases where you're left with few options. If the system is that critical have 2 of everything (clusters, databases, etc.) in a way where the mirror can stay untouched and keep your business going. And if it needs saying, something like updates or reboots should never happen truly automatically (as in the software decided when or if to do it). A human should decide how to automate that and have full control over when and if it happens.

justsomehnguy 4y ago

I don't remember any server systems to reboot for updates if not configured to do so. And I've seen enough WinSvr in my life. Probably nobody consulted a sysadmin when they designed the system. *grin* Windows 10 behaviour is another story, but I would always stand on what it's a self-inflicted wound - people blamed MS for not updating soon enough... while disabling or postponing updates for literally years. MS acted. Poorly, yes, because by that time it ascended to General Motors levels of bureaucracy[0], but again - this is another story. [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

jeroenhd 4y ago
That's the thing I notice when I see people complaining about Windows choosing to update itself: I get the feeling people just don't want to reboot their machine for five minutes every week. For at least 80% of the comments I read, I'm pretty sure these people would never apply updates if they had the opportunity to. Sure, Windows update takes a while, but it's still so much better than whatever the hell Apple is doing. Despite the fact that I abhor removing the possibility to choose what your device does when, I think forced automatic updates are net win for computer users worldwide. In fact, I suspect Microsoft may need to be even more forceful, because even though consumer Windows rebooted itself at the time, wannacry and friends still managed to spread across the globe using an exploit that had been patched in an important security updates months before.