Enjoy the weekend, sysadmins: Next Tues fixes 33 Microsoft bugs

Microsoft has promised to fix a high-profile vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8, among other holes, in this month's Patch Tuesday rollout of security updates. In all, next week's bucket of upgrades will address 33 bugs in a range of Redmond software. The flaws have been grouped into 10 sets of holes: two marked critical and …

[Anonymous Coward]

This update affects all versions...

"This update affects all versions of the web browser from IE6 to IE10 on all Windows operating systems from XP to Win8, including RT."

I thought win7/8 were complete rewrites, looks like they rewrote the bugs too.

[Zaphod.Beeblebrox]

Re: This update affects all versions...

Probably ought to take some reading comprehension classes, mate. That particular bug is in the IE browser, not in the Windows OS proper.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This update affects all versions...

It is entirely possible to include bugs in re-written software, as it may be the specification documents which are actually the source of the bug.

[El Andy]

Re: This update affects all versions...

The only "rewrite" of Windows in it's entire history was the introduction of Windows NT, no matter what massively misinformed people on the internet might suggest. Every other version has been built upon a previous in some form or another.

And for the hard of thinking, the "Longhorn Reset" which lead to Vista was *not* a complete re-write, the codebase was merely rolled back to Windows Server 2003 SP1 and development restarted.

[sabroni]

Re: no matter what massively misinformed people on the internet might suggest

You cite no references for what you say and then you imply that people who think differently to you are stupid. You look exactly like any other misinformed internet person.

[Rukario]

Re: This update affects all versions...

> The only "rewrite" of Windows in it's entire history was the introduction of Windows NT, no matter what massively misinformed people on the internet might suggest. Every other version has been built upon a previous in some form or another.

And Windows NT itself was built upon OS/2. The NT 4.0 system help files still made reference to itself as OS/2.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

I really don't understand this fixation on reboots. If I have a server (beit Windows, Linux, UNIX, whatever) that needs to have high uptime, I'd make it a cluster. This way, if one fails or needs rebooting, it doesn't matter in the slightest.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

Reboots are dangerous. The hardware is exercised in ways that don't normally happen on a day to day basis (eg hard disks spin down and then, hopefully, back up) and, unless somebody has correctly modified the config files, you might lose all/some of the changes that have occurred since the last reboot. Even the best run places will occasionally have issues with this type of thing.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had problems with a manually changed route or disk mount that either isn't reflected in the config or else has a typo in the config that results in boot failure. The same with hardware failures which included, in one instance, an exploding CPU board.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eadon is your friend

>>Reboots are dangerous. The hardware is exercised in ways that don't normally happen on a day to day basis<<

I love to live dangerously and switch my pc off when I leave work. That adrenaline rush the next morning when I hit power and wait for the cpu to explode is delicious.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Eadon is your friend

> switch my pc off when I leave work.

I'm not talking about the toys on your desk, but the servers in the server room.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

This is at least part of the point: If there is a chance that hardware is going to fail or the OS is going to die due to badly implemented changes, I want to know about it when I've got scheduled downtime. I certainly don't want to be dealing with it when the machine has crashed and burned for some other reason, during production hours.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I'm not talking about the toys on your desk

Ooh, get her! My computer is bigger than yours! Look at the RAM on that!

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

Exactly. When I managed unix boxes, they didn't need rebooting, but I still did anyway (when the box wasn't being used) just to check that everything "comes back ok" - in the past there have been, for example, startup scripts installed with the wrong permissions, or config files that haven't been changed (an op runs a command at the console - sees the change work, then forgets to update the relevant startup file)

If your reboot fails due to something you've installed, you can normally sort the problem out within minutes - if the failure goes unnoticed until the machine reboots 6 months later, it can take much longer to diagnose.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

" and, unless somebody has correctly modified the config files, you might lose all/some of the changes that have occurred since the last reboot."

What config files are you on about? Sounds like a quaint Linux thing to me....

[TheMidnighToker]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

you're right; it's a barbaric idea keeping configs in a form that they can be easily backed up, edited and can even contain comments...

[Jamie Jones]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

What config files are you on about? Sounds like a quaint Linux thing to me....

Generic unix, actually. Still, if you want a GUI front end to that config file, then those are available too.

As for your windows, where do you think any changes you make are stored? In files, or in the magic magic land?

[ScottK]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

To the AC with the exploding CPU board, you must be a very unlucky person. If I was you would avoid playing the lottery or going outside in a thunderstorm.

In a 20 year plus IT career I am struggling to think of many serious issues I have had following reboots. I have had some problems in the past following duff updates, but I can't recall any hardware failures caused by a reboot. Perhaps you are running crappy hardware.

Since virtually all servers I deal with nowadays are VMs there is no extra stress on the hardware, they reboot very quickly and can be quickly rolled back to a pre-update snapshot if they didn't come back up. On the few occasions I have to restart physical hardware all the VMs have been migrated off beforehand anyway. At worst I will have a down host I have to sort out but there is no business impact. However, I haven't had any of those I can recall recently either.

[gregthecanuck]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

We had an IBM AIX Power 5xx server fail on reboot after being moved between racks. One of the CPU boards had developed a fault and for some reason didn't execute the fail-over cleanly. Dead supposedly redundant server! The techie had never seen the problem before. S*it happens.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

....that needs to have high uptime, I'd make it a cluster.....

yes but Eadon doesn't need to cluster his home webserver, no-one cares. And let's face it, so long as he has access to reg comments and /b he is happy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

> FFS - AC's make a handle and USE IT!

You need to register in order to comment, and that includes creating a handle. So the ACs already have handles. (Agreed on second point, they just don't use them.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

@Eadon - "AC's make a handle and USE IT!"

Why should we? It's so much more fun sniping from the bushes at the shouty guy. He won't know which way the flak is coming from next, let alone the strength of his enemies...

"Over here!",

"No, over here"

"No not over there, over here!"

"I'm Spartacus!"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

Just to please Eadon, could we please have a week were you report on just how many patches and updates have been uploaded this week into the repositories of all major linux distributions - just so we can all shout back OMG YET MORE UPDATES TO THIS BUGGY PILE OF CRAP LINUX FAIL

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

> Just to please Eadon, could we please have a week were you report on just how many patches and updates have been uploaded this week into the repositories of all major linux distributions

openSuSE 12.3. The last patches were on May 1 for:

libmediawiki - Interface for MediaWiki web service

libkgeomap - KDE wrapper around World map components

libkface - KDE wrapper for facial recognition and detection

kipi-plugins - KDE plugins for Image Manipulation

digikam - KDE photo manager

None of them were critical.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

you might be very true in your statement but what really pisses me off with Windows patching is the reboots.

With some Linux Distros even kernel changes don't always need a system reboot. Yet windows....

Patch, reboot, patch, reboot

Just install .Net V4 and go through the patch reboot cycle if you don't believe me. Patches on top of patches on top of patches.

If they fixed this then I'd be more of a fan. Until then... sorry it is a broken toy. Sadly I have to use the sodding thing (server variant) for work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

Poor EADON, no rest.

Just when he thinks it's gone quiet, someone tramp tramp tramps over his bridge.....

[ScottK]

Re: Come on wintards get rebooting your servers!

I know I really shouldn't feed the troll, but here goes...

Eadon, here in the real world where people who don't still live with their mum like you have pay mortgages and feed their kids, most businesses we deal with run Windows based applications. This is a fact of life. Even if we wanted to use a different OS, we can't as in many cases there is no alternative application. Many of these apps use obscure data formats and the companies which wrote them have long since gone bust. Migrating to something else is either not possible or very difficult and the client isn't willing to pay to try, since what they have still works. Don't even start about trying to run them under WINE or any other such nonsense as in many cases even just getting some of these truly shitty applications to run properly on a more modern version of windows or a terminal server takes a lot of work.

Also, many of the SMEs I work with have staff who are comfortable with what they know. I have tried to give Linux based machines to end users with little success. My most recent attempt was with the latest version of Mint. The end result was a user literally in tears as she couldn't do anything. Most of these people are not "alpha geeks", they are simply end users who want a tool that lets them do their job and go home to their family. In many cases, that tool is their Windows based applications.

That was the long version. Short version, please just fuck off.

[ubergeek]

Hopefully, they won't break running anti-virus programs this time.

Paris, because even she'd check first!

[Tom 13]

Re: developed and tested a fix for the IE8 bug in less than two weeks

While it does indeed reflect on them recognizing the seriousness of the bug, for some reason I expect we'll be seeing an additional update for this specific security flaw next month, and possibly the month after.

[Anonymous Coward]

IE6 is being patched?

I thought it was end of life?

even microsofted want it killed off, so why's is being patched?

[El Andy]

Re: IE6 is being patched?

Because Microsoft committed to a support lifecycle for XP during which they will provide security fixes for it. IE6 was included in XP and therefore is subject to the same promise of support. Just because Microsoft would like it gone as much as anyone, doesn't change the fact they are still obliged to honour their commitments.

[ecofeco]

Oh crap

That is all.