Patch Tuesday, Meet Dammit Wednesday.

Posted by Markus Langenfeld - 02/13/08 at 10:02:12 pm

Over the years Microsoft’s ‘Patch Tuesday’ has become a familiar menace for geeks and IT professionals alike. Ever since the days of Windows 98, Patch Tuesday has been Microsoft’s opportunity to unleash the latest security updates into the wild for millions upon millions of Windows PC’s to download, at the same time.

Today I have coined a new name that from now on will be forever stained on my Outlook calendar and that’s “Dammit Wednesday”. Dammit Wednesday is when I come into the office to find all of our Windows based servers magically rebooted and I have to clean up the mess and cope with the analytical data loss. Dammit Wednesday is when I can open up bandwidth graphs and actually see the traffic spike when the 1000’s of subscriber PC’s go online simultaneously to download these updates. Dammit Wednesday is like having a 2nd Monday in the same week.

Sure I could configure our machines to wait for manual updates to be done, but going through each server and babysitting as it downloads a couple more-than-likely insignificant security patches takes a lot of time, time that I don’t have. The worst part about Patch Tuesday however is that it always manages to catch everyone off guard every month, hence the new Outlook reminder.

Dammit Wednesday, something we can all relate to.

Much like Courtney’s Top Secret Tuesday idea (except not as often) I’m introducing Dammit Wednesday, on the 2nd Wednesday of every month I will post a new information technology woe that I hope many of my readers will read and enjoy (or at least share my pain).

4 Comments »

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

  1. hahaha! I was going to mention that you could make the computers not automatically restart and install the updates…but you covered that point…

    Comment by courtney — February 14, 2008 #

  2. Yeah. That would work if I had a hand full of machines to deal with, but we’re talking about 18 or 19 servers and they would have to go down either way.

    Comment by Markus Langenfeld — February 14, 2008 #

  3. hhahahaha, this is great!

    Comment by Nick Davis — February 14, 2008 #

  4. Yeh, I imagine working at an ISP would be rough on days like that. We do manual reboots every few weekends at work.

    Comment by Chris Kenworthy — February 14, 2008 #

Leave a comment

XHTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Copyright © 2008 Markus Langenfeld. Some Rights Reserved.
Version 26, Powered By WordPress & Professionally Hosted With A Small Orange.
Disclosure Policy | XML Sitemap