When I got my hands on a server running a fully legitimate Windows Server 2003 R2, the question arose: what to do about online updates? They close security holes, improve performance, and generally — bring communism a little closer in one particular server.
As far as I know, everyone who doesn’t update their Windows does so because their copy is pirated. But this one was completely legitimate, wonderful, and lawful — a clear conscience and the sheep safe and sound.
I thought it over and decided — I’ll install the updates. However, since it’s not right for a machine to be smarter than its sysadmin, I set the mode where it would “download the updates, show them to the system administrator, and then he — God grant him good health — will take a look and only then click.” Like that old joke about the new Russian and some prompt from a program: “agree, but not right away, otherwise what kind of authority are you.”
So I set that up and went home. The obedient Windows downloaded a bunch of updates overnight (a lot, since the machine had been sitting powered off for a long time) and presented them before the sysadmin’s bright eyes in the morning.
And thank God those eyes were indeed bright. I spotted in that list, in the foreign tongue, something like this:
“Update No. KB-whatevs, fixes an error where Windows crashes with a BSOD or fails to boot after the previous update No. KB-whatchamacallit” Being young at heart but mature in spirit, I made a firm executive decision — “don’t touch what works” — clicked Cancel, and never installed any more updates on that server.
And today, while browsing the LJ community ru_sysadmins, I saw just how right I had been:
http://community.livejournal.com/ru_sysadmins/1199819.html 2003 server bsod wtf After installing an SP from Windows Update, Windows crashes to a BSOD on boot. UPD: It all ended with a clean reinstall of the server. MDaemon turns out to be easy to restore — just install it on top again :) what was I sweating all day for…
So there you go, kids. Don’t install Windows updates.