boo @ outsourcing
Yet another reason why being outsourced IT sucks…
Generally speaking we set a group policy for our clients to disable Automatic Updates. We’ve had entirely too many incidents where an update was automatically installed and broke something vital. We’ve had servers go down, we’ve had critical pieces of software stop working, we’ve had computers refuse to boot. I’m not saying that all of Microsoft’s updates are crap… And we generally wind up installing all the updates eventually… But it is usually safer to run the updates when we’ve got someone on-site paying attention to what is being installed, so we can roll back any changes that break things.
I just got off the phone with one of our clients… He was in a panic because none of their computers have done an automatic update in weeks and all the options for automatic updates are greyed out. I explained to him that it was intentional, that we were reluctant to allow automatic updates for fear that they’d break something.
I also pointed out that his company in specific had been burned by automatic updates at least twice that I could remember. There was an update to the .Net framework that broke a piece of software that they use quite extensively, and a number of the websites that they rely on had some serious issues with Internet Explorer 7. Both of those issues resulted in putting a person on-site to remove the offending updates and then manually disabling the updates on each machine. Shortly after the second incident we put the group policy in place to prevent future problems.
Well, he wants to be able to run automatic updates. Specifically, he wants to be able to install SP3. I explained to him that we haven’t had a chance to test SP3 against their software and couldn’t garontee that it would work properly… But he assured me that he installed it this morning on his machine and it is working fine.
Obviously a few hours on a manager’s PC that doesn’t run any of their essential engineering software proves that SP3 won’t cause problems.
Of course I disabled the group policy… It is their network, their server, their computers… They’re free to do whatever they want with them… They don’t have to listen to a word I say… But I’d be willing to bet that we’ll have to put a person on-site in a few days to un-do the problems that are going to crop up. And, while I don’t mind charging people for their stupidity, I really don’t have time to go fix problems that could have easily been prevented.