Proper procedure?
OK, this begs a genuine question. You are an IT guy at some company that is a lot more serious than a mom-and-pop candy shop. You have a lot of laptops, and a significant number of servers. You need to deal with MSFT, and you also have software from other vendors running here and there. All of these issue updates from time to time, MSFT may be somewhat more organized than others as far as update schedules go.
Would you go over the list of patches (maybe de-obfuscated by El Reg or someone else) and test these patches individually in some sort of staging area to verify that they don't break anything AMD-based, ATI-based, Hyper-V-based, an odd installed DLL, or a non-default configuration setting that you pushed everywhere for unrelated reasons? Will you test and apply the critical stuff first and deal with less important updates later (but still test them)? Or, presented with such a mess, just apply the whole update on staging machines, check for any black smoke, and roll it out to every box in the organization as one big lump? Especially if the software/updates may affect the system boot, user logins, operation, security, etc.?
Inquiring minds want to know. One reason for the curiosity is that we provide software and updates, and we want to make our customers' admins' lives as easy as possible. Not only by having no (all right, as few as possible) bugs in the first place but also by integrating into the customers' procedures smoothly even when there are no bugs. My experience and inclinations do not necessarily tell me what others do.
What say you, commentards?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
