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>In one fun case, we had a corporate client disable automatic updates for their entire research lab because one night Windows update decided it needed to automa

>In one fun case, we had a corporate client disable automatic updates for their entire research lab because one night Windows update decided it needed to automatically reboot every single system there. They were running overnight experiments and came in the next morning to find that all of the night's data was missing or corrupted, costing them a day on a tight schedule. That is a small edge case on a consumer OS running on a billion PCs, maybe they should have had some half-competent people running the lab instead of having defaults that are meant for normal users? WSUS lets them have full control over updates and restarts. Most decent enterprises and univertisies use it. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/bb332157.as... >Microsoft does software updates in a very, very wrong way Pray, tell us the right way. What would you have wanted Microsoft to do if there was this vulnerability that came today and the lab was running the research experiment for the next 3 days?

thaumaturgy 14y ago
Did you actually want me to grace your stupidly rude comment with a reply, or are you just grandstanding? Let me know so I don't waste my time.
- cooldeal 14y ago
  I am not the GP but I am curious about your proposed solution. You were comparing a browser updates to Windows Server, which could be running IIS running a bank website, Exchange server for mail or Lync/Communicator server. Does Apache do automatic updates for critical vulnerabilities? I hope you can either give better examples than Chrome for comparison, or actually give a solution to this problem which is not isolated to Windows, most distributions require restarts for kernel updates,. With that perspective, your post was the one that seemed to be grandstanding and railing at Windows Update without providing specific solutions. http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need-to-reboot-for-updates-so-often http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need... http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to-reboot-so-often http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to...
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - thaumaturgy 14y ago
    I have absolutely no influence at Microsoft. Why are you asking me to talk further over how I would do their software architecture differently? There is absolutely no hope of changing anything, at all, by doing that. It's a waste of time. That's why there was no "proposed solution" anywhere in my comment. Let's recap. 1: A new 0-day has just been released that affects IE 7, 8, 9, etc. 2: givan points out that the long release cycle for Internet Explorer means that this will probably be a viable exploit for a long time to come. (And he's right.) 3: greenyoda says, no, Windows Update will fix this. Especially, "[IE] does get automatic updates, just like other browsers." 4: I jump in -- something I am becoming more and more convinced was a huge mistake -- and point out some of the reasons why Windows automatic updates are not just like other browsers. Have I gone wrong somewhere yet? Do you really think that Windows automatic updates are "just like other browsers"? Why do you want me to accept that Windows updates have to suck just because Windows is a huge complicated piece of software? Does any of that invalidate any of the reasons I mentioned for why users turn off automatic updates? Or is it your argument that people don't turn off Windows automatic updates? Because even Coding Horror has a rather popular post from 2005 on how to disable it (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/05/xp-automatic-update-nagging.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/05/xp-automatic-update...), and that's targeted at a technical audience, so frankly I'm not yet convinced that anybody who thinks that disabling Windows automatic updates isn't a popular thing to do is someone that I should spend any time debating this with. Does Apache do automatic updates for critical vulnerabilities? No. Could it? Sure. I bet half the people on this forum alone could write a cron job to do just that. But more importantly: who cares? The fact alone that Microsoft pushes browser updates through the exact same channel as kernel updates makes their update process very wrong. I don't think I have to spend any time at all going out on a fishing expedition finding you examples of software that does it right to argue that at this point browser updates should be getting their own channel from MS. (Just in case I really have to spell it out: treating operating system updates as exactly equivalent to browser updates is stupid. Not doing so would solve your number one rebuttal, which seems to be that Microsoft can't do updates better because software is hard.) If you insist on having me come up with an entirely new way to engineer software for Microsoft, I expect to be paid for that. And I'm still reading patio11's latest post on kalzumeus, so my rates just went up.

thaumaturgy 14y ago

Did you actually want me to grace your stupidly rude comment with a reply, or are you just grandstanding? Let me know so I don't waste my time.

cooldeal 14y ago
I am not the GP but I am curious about your proposed solution. You were comparing a browser updates to Windows Server, which could be running IIS running a bank website, Exchange server for mail or Lync/Communicator server. Does Apache do automatic updates for critical vulnerabilities? I hope you can either give better examples than Chrome for comparison, or actually give a solution to this problem which is not isolated to Windows, most distributions require restarts for kernel updates,. With that perspective, your post was the one that seemed to be grandstanding and railing at Windows Update without providing specific solutions. http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need-to-reboot-for-updates-so-often http://superuser.com/questions/283230/why-does-mac-os-x-need... http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to-reboot-so-often http://askubuntu.com/questions/32098/why-does-ubuntu-need-to...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- thaumaturgy 14y ago
  I have absolutely no influence at Microsoft. Why are you asking me to talk further over how I would do their software architecture differently? There is absolutely no hope of changing anything, at all, by doing that. It's a waste of time. That's why there was no "proposed solution" anywhere in my comment. Let's recap. 1: A new 0-day has just been released that affects IE 7, 8, 9, etc. 2: givan points out that the long release cycle for Internet Explorer means that this will probably be a viable exploit for a long time to come. (And he's right.) 3: greenyoda says, no, Windows Update will fix this. Especially, "[IE] does get automatic updates, just like other browsers." 4: I jump in -- something I am becoming more and more convinced was a huge mistake -- and point out some of the reasons why Windows automatic updates are not just like other browsers. Have I gone wrong somewhere yet? Do you really think that Windows automatic updates are "just like other browsers"? Why do you want me to accept that Windows updates have to suck just because Windows is a huge complicated piece of software? Does any of that invalidate any of the reasons I mentioned for why users turn off automatic updates? Or is it your argument that people don't turn off Windows automatic updates? Because even Coding Horror has a rather popular post from 2005 on how to disable it (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/05/xp-automatic-update-nagging.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/05/xp-automatic-update...), and that's targeted at a technical audience, so frankly I'm not yet convinced that anybody who thinks that disabling Windows automatic updates isn't a popular thing to do is someone that I should spend any time debating this with. Does Apache do automatic updates for critical vulnerabilities? No. Could it? Sure. I bet half the people on this forum alone could write a cron job to do just that. But more importantly: who cares? The fact alone that Microsoft pushes browser updates through the exact same channel as kernel updates makes their update process very wrong. I don't think I have to spend any time at all going out on a fishing expedition finding you examples of software that does it right to argue that at this point browser updates should be getting their own channel from MS. (Just in case I really have to spell it out: treating operating system updates as exactly equivalent to browser updates is stupid. Not doing so would solve your number one rebuttal, which seems to be that Microsoft can't do updates better because software is hard.) If you insist on having me come up with an entirely new way to engineer software for Microsoft, I expect to be paid for that. And I'm still reading patio11's latest post on kalzumeus, so my rates just went up.