So in reading tonight's bulletins .... man if I had a vendor forcing me to stay on Windows 2000 service pack 3? Right now I'd be screaming my little head off....one of them... the one on the Print Spooler issue.... if you can't patch because you are not on SP4 [which as of June 30, 2005 is the SP that they are supporting], I'm not sure you can add that registry edit to disallow annoyomous access to the print spooler pipes. If you can't do that, can't patch... you can always disable the print spooler service....
uh.. you might want to decide what off the Internet you want to print first before you disable the service though....that kinda puts a crimp in you using your HP laserjet...
Dana and I were chatting tonight and he's already put the patches through his patch testing process whereby on VMware he pulls an image of his actual machine, patches it in testing before he deploys it on the real machine. He uses a tool from Vmware for this that he gets from the VMware Technology Network subscription used for testing [hey... testing patches] and it will snap an image and virtualize a real machine.
...oh this sounds so cool... we might just have to make sure Dana chats about this up at SMBnation where he and I will be presenting...now mind you VMware testing is like testing the patches like I do on the machine here at home before deploying at the office... you won't catch any funky specific hardware stuff, but you will catch software related....
Oh I think I'm definitely going to buy this .... in my perfect world my SBS server would have a snap image-ability like this... something that would let me have a roll back feature so that no matter what the patches did to my box I'd be able to easily and quickly and ...without the sinking feeling of terror ... roll back. While it's been a long time since anything bad has occurred.. it's one of those things that you just want to try to live your life without experiencing too many times...or at least have a real good plan of action. I see a lot of people concerned about the fact that they can't truly have a duplicate spare server 'just in case'. While I am legally allowed because of Software Assurance to have cold server rights, I've rather felt that I'd rather spend the money on good quality components than a duplicate device that couldn't be pulling an image 24/7.
So ...you doing your patch testing? Getting ready for deployment? Read the next blog post for a reminder of some best practices....
![[There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not.]](http://www.sbslinks.com/images/headertop.png "There's a reason that Yoda is the unofficial mascot of SBS. Size indeed matters not!")