Brilliant idea regarding patching

re: Brilliant idea regarding patching

Philip Elder — Thu, 31 May 2007 17:07:08 GMT

Indy, In response to your dialogue box ... I believe that most of us test our patching on either a lab or virtual setup, or even our own in-office setups before heading out to clients. This gives us a heads-up on how the patches behave. Think GDI, WGA,or IE7 on XP as examples of dialogue boxes. The experience of running the patches before hand gives us a good idea of how they run based on the speed of our systems versus the speed of our client's systems. Some are faster, some would run slower. That would be something to keep in mind. Larry, -f is mandatory in my opinion as some services may refuse to release. Philip E.

re: Brilliant idea regarding patching

Philip Elder — Thu, 31 May 2007 16:33:10 GMT

Pingback: http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2007/05/sbs-2k3-all-versions-scheduling-reboot.html Blog post includes instructions on scheduling the reboot. Absolutely awesome tip Susan. We truly appreciate it! Philip E. MPECS Inc.

re: Brilliant idea regarding patching

Craig — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:18:51 GMT

Excellent idea. Will defintely keep this in mind in the future.

re: Brilliant idea regarding patching

Indy — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:14:16 GMT

Terrible idea. What if a dialog box is open prompting you for something else? What if something causes the install to take longer than an hour? What if you lose connectivity before you can verify any of this? Solution? Make sure you can get to a KVM with IP or other assured connectivity to that box for crit SP installs. Or use a service like Lights Out on HP servers.

re: Brilliant idea regarding patching

Larry Seltzer — Thu, 31 May 2007 13:36:49 GMT

I would do this: shutdown -r -t 5 -d p:99:88 -r reboots -t 5 sets the timeout to 5. arbitrary, but the default is something like 30 seconds -d puts the code in the logs. I'm picking planned with 99 as major and 88 as minor, but I think it's all arbitrary. Would -f (forces running applications to close without warning) be a good choice here?

re: Brilliant idea regarding patching

Corey — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:07:55 GMT

Susan, How do you schedule a reboot in SBS?