*&$%#%$ windows updates

[mobrien_12]

I manage a computer room for the physics students.  Well today I went through and patched all the boxes, linux, w98, w2k.  Linux patches went lightning fast.  Had to reboot two or three times with each winbox.  

What really angers is that MS always lists Windows media player under the critical updates.  I uninstalled that piece of crap when the patches started requiring me to give MS root access to my boxes as a side effect of patching their crappy software.  They KNOW I don't have WMP installed, but they REALLY want me to install their DRM #$%^ so they list it as a critical security patch.

Bite me, MS.  My computers are MINE!  

End of rant.

[voidmain]

Those are the exact things that used to piss me off when installing/updating NT/2k servers. 35 hundred reboots and 4 hours later you might have a base install. Then apply the service packs, reboot some more. Then install software, reboot some more. What a freakin' nightmare! Every Linux server I built took exactly one reboot when the install finished. Software installation, configuration changes, and updates required exactly 0 reboots. Upgrading the kernel is the only exception which rarely if ever is needed in a corporate network environment.

And for those that complain about boot times on the dinky little PCs they should have to sit through all the reboots required to get an NT server up to date on a larger intel based server with a couple of SCSI cards and maybe a couple of onboard SCSI controllers with RAID arrays and tape drives attached. You're lucky if you are through all the BIOS checks in 10 minutes let alone waiting on the OS to load.

Then the arrogance of the software police showing up to collect the MS tax really made me happy. We were only several hundred thousand dollars short one year, and not even on purpose.

[ October 07, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]

[beltorak0]

several hundred thousand? how mnay computers / users did your company entail?

-t?

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   O M G
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[voidmain]

Somewhere around 4,000 users varying from backoffice to developers with around 300 wintel servers and around 75 larger UNIX servers and a few mainframes.

It's funny because I was running Samba on at least half of the UNIX servers and the Microsoft goons ran their network scanners and they showed up as NT servers in their software. They wanted to charge us for Windows licenses on our UNIX servers and almost got away with it until I got wind of it and said "Hold on there lusers!".

[ October 10, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]