Slashdot Mirror
IBM Tells Employees To Hold Off WinXP SP2
robpoe writes "As reported by ZDNet, IBM's technology department has warned internal users to not install Windows XP SP2 until IBM can fix some known issues with the way IE6 is updated, and Big Blue can make a customized version of the patch - 'The company's technology department said the delay is 'due to known application problems and incompatibility with IBM workstation applications.''" However, the article also mentions that: "One IBM employee in the company's internal technology department characterized the decision as routine."
Hey, lots of companies install policies on their IT assets that flat out prevent installing unauthorized patches on corporate systems.
This is a pretty big patch, and people have known for a while that it's going to change the way some things work. It makes sense to show caution before allowing a mass deployment. There's not much news here.
but aren't all major corps saying "LOOOK DUMBASS' WE CONTROL THE UPDATES DO NOT TAKE THE INITIATIVE TO UPDATE OUR BOXES UNLESS WE TELL YOU TOO!!!" I can say here where I work with over 500k employees that the admins are twitching knowing that security is going apeshit saying "Nope, nope, nope, can't install that, nope nope nope." and they desperately want to fix and patch the boxes in one fell swoop but know that it will break custom built apps. Here's for making all apps run on the web instead of locally!
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Isn't this sort of decision standard in any large organisation? As with any upgrade, IBM will want to ensure that the upgrade isn't going to break any internal applications. No large organisation is going to want employees installing significant OS upgrades without central verification.
I'm sure everyone is chomping to blame MS for some catastrophic failure of XPSP2 installations around the world, but really, nearly every IT department is doing the same thing.
This is about configuration management of a network, just like with all other software.
How long do you think it takes for an organisation with over 300 thousand employees to change its employees' desktop environment? How many much smaller organisations still use NT 4?
IBM's technology department has warned internal users to not install Windows XP SP2 until IBM can fix some known issues
And of course, the first thing that happens is, this internal memo somehow finds its way to ZDNet. Looks like PR FUD to me.
It's good though, at least Microsoft gets a little of its own medicine once in a while...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
The reason we're being told to hold off is that the new IE might not be compatible with some internal applications on the intranet (stuff like, payroll, expenses claims etc). There's no wording that SP2 breaks stuff in general, just that some critical IBM apps are effected. So stop scare mongering!
Not much better to be a brother than a boyfriend in that case.
My sister's computer just craps out when she uses it. She brings it over to be fixed, I boot it up and everything is fine. I leave it on, I play with it... anything I can think of to trigger this catastrophic failure she keeps seeing and *nothing* happens. I call it good, she takes it home and can't even turn it on.
Somehow it's inevitably my fault but I still don't know how.
Its better to have a system with known quirks than an system with unknown quirks
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Because Microsoft never releases broken software from beta, right?
*snort*
What color bridge would you like, sir?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
IBM is just following standard change management/control procedures. Of course, they want to ensure that their own internal application still work after the apply of SP2. Whats wrong with that ? I hope most organisations will test SP2 out in test environments before rolling out to production PC's. This is just common sense. I pity some people who cant understand normal change control procedures. This is a mind set that unfortunately appears to be being lost - these are lessons learned nearly 30 years ago on mainframes. The same principles still apply today whether it be mainframe, nid-range or PC's. This has nothing to do with IBM's clients - this is for their own internal systems. Some people are implying that this is a plot to undermine Microsoft and promote Linux - IBM is a conundrum of ideas and directions - there are people pushing Windows and some people pushing Linux. I am not biased towards one or the other - just use the right OS for the right job. And further to what some people have expressed in this story that this is somehow a plot by IBM to undermine Microsoft - whoo ! what vivid imaginations some people have !
IBM is being prudent in this case, because of the issues they identified with well known applications and their internal applications. I wouldn't be surprised if the are also holding off on the update until some of their internal applications are updated. A large portion of the company probably relys on these applications, and updating would cause too much downtime. They probably identifed the issues with these applications during the SP2 beta cycle, have updated them, and are beginning the process of updating images and rolling them out.
That being said, I'm wondering if we'll start seeing announcements from other companies that are doing the same thing. I'm thinking that HP probably has as many PCs if not more than IBM.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Companies have a difficult balance... testing patches and updates to software to ensure compatibility for their context, while getting patches in place to address vulnerabilities.
Anyways, I need to get back to trying to fix my Windows XP desktop at work. SP2 broke it severely, and I'm not doing a repair re-install of XP for the second time to try to get the damn thing operational again. Good thing I only run Windows in VMWare with Linux as my workstation's core OS ;)
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
Why won't it be approved? Let's play out a scenario for you, and let's see if you see a problem here:
1) Average desktop XP system has third party as well as custom application software installed on it. It's know as "this is how the average user gets their work done."
2) Install SP2 on XP systems
3) After rebooting, third party as well as custom application software is broken.
For the custom applications you can schedule some time for your development team get it to working correctly on SP2. Still not a particularly a nice thing to do since they already had enough work to do, so this either means pushing projects back (yeah, right) or asking them to work unpaid overtime.
For third party applications, WTF are you going to do? Yell at them? Yeah, that's going to be real effective. That's right, you're going to wait. Whether you want to get any work done while waiting for the update depends on whether you install SP2 or wait to install it later.
Basically it comes down to waiting until third parties update their software, third parties publish workaround for problems, testing on test systems uncovers workarounds for all known problems, or - this is the fun bit - Microsoft updates SP2 to fix problems with third parties who can't/won't/refuse to update their applications.
Exactly, I don't know why this got any news coverage. It isn't as if IBM sent a letter to customers telling them not to install SP2; they just want to control configuration problems internally. They don't need Lotus Notes to go belly-up in half the corporation because folks didn't wait for the patch to be tested on their intranet.
So if you deployed a Linux on 10000 machines on all your tech, marketing, IT, sales teams computers, and you had developped specific applications, drivers for some specific devices, and all the crap, you would just tell them: Sure, let's upgrate from 2.4 to 2.6 and cross your fingers?
The fact that they are cautious doesn't mean they distrust SP2. Like any major upgrage to a kernel (to any OS), it is going to break some of your specific devs, would it be only slightly.
This would be true for any OS. The fact that this one is Microsoft doesn't make it something against MS.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
I've used to work for IBM. Remember recieving my laptop (T21), don't recall any special notes on 'not downloading any patches'. OTOH, this patch changes so many things, that I understand why IBM is so paranoid about it. They don't want to deal with all the broken apps.
... Or may be never.
Personally, I'm going to hold on with this patch as well. Why do I need it anyway? When I ru Windows (and I have a dual boot), I only use Mozilla as a browser, have firewall, Active-X tracker, always up to date virus scanner, and several spybot scanners/detectors. So I would rather hold on till, say, the end of this year -- when dust settles down
Who can blame them?
My methodology has always been to watch the history of updates from a given source. After a couple of years of updates that do more good than harm you trust them enough to apply them almost immediately. I say almost because you at least try it on a few test machines first, but this can be done within hours of the updates availability.
What you do after not one, but several bad updates, those that break key components and fix problems that you don't even have, or claim to fix problems but actually don't, that is another matter. Having been burned on an update from any company, I put the company "on probation" and apply new updates only after extensive testing.
This is a simple intuitive approach, that I think most users apply to both software updates as well as new product releases, and even hardware purchases. I have my own shit-list of hardware vendors as I suspect most people do. I just don't buy from these companies until they do something to change their reputation. Most never do. It is a true rarity for a company to suddenly discover the value of quality products to their future business. Companies either get it, or they don't. Microsoft has never got it, other than the original release of Windows NT which appears to have been thoroughly tested. From more recent experience this must have been a fluke, or, since NT was such a departure from previous version of Windows they were just uncharacteristically carefull.
I'll join the chorus of people saying that big companies, governmental organizations,etc. ALWAYS do their own testing. If they did that testing during the beta phase for this update, then they are ahead of the game and may be applying it now for real. If they are not on the beta program, then they will test on their own systems starting now. I doubt there are many exceptions to this.
* Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft. You can either moderate at face value, or actually read what I have to say first. *
After working for the company for the past two summers as an intern, I've come to know a bunch of people who actually *gasp* work there. I'd say that 1/2 of them are Linux geeks who understand that while Linux is great and all, it will not cure AIDS, feed the poor, or save the whales/children. Neither will Windows. They're fucking OS's that you can either RUN or NOT RUN. Choose one and leave the preaching to the guys in the Vatican. The company is as evil as any other public company who is responsible to their bottom line and their shareholders (that goes for any company, not just software houses). Beyond that, its just a bunch of people who love to code, love what they do, and whether you believe it or not, are pretty fucking good at it (if you don't believe me, go through the interview/hiring process yourself and let me know how it goes).
It's come to the point where after having sat in both the "Microsoft sucks, everything they do is awful, evil, and will bring about a world dictatorship" camp and the "Eh, I'll work there for a bit and see what its like" camp, the only conclusion I can draw is that those who hate Microsoft with a passion, have some sort of underlying motivation for doing so. My whole life I had used Linux exclusively. My whole life I had coded solely in Linux. However, I decided to give it a shot, because I have a *gasp* open mind, and interviewed there. I went in almost viweing the entire experience as a joke, but I left loving the people, loving the campus, having a great time, and wondering whether or not I should consider this more seriously. So while I was being flown out to Seattle on MS's dime (hey, why not fly out to Seattle, all expenses paid for the weekend, even if I don't take the job) the rest of the kids in my CS program were bitching about how evil Microsoft is while at the same time complaining that they had nowhere to work. Unbeknownst to them, and many of the people here, there is this place called the "real world" and RMS's vision of an IP-unencumbered future is not a part of it. Rent, car payments, tuition, and food, are a _major_ part of it, however. Microsoft takes care of these things. Writing free software, for the vast majority of people, certainly does not.
Microsoft is just a software company. That is it. They are not some evil empire obsessed with world domination. They are not the fucking Third Reich. If you don't like them, don't buy their software. Is there any need to go any further than that? Do we really need to devote a front page article to the fact that IBM advised their employees not to upgrade their internal computers to XPSP2? When the newest Linux kernel comes out, do you honestly think that companies with hundreds of thousands of computers in their enterprise deployments tell all end-users to immediately upgrade? How about OS X users? How about ANY OPERATING SYSTEM ON THE PLANET? Regardless of what OS or software package we're talking about, if you have an internal user base of that many people AND you're running custom apps, you're going to advise people to hold off for a bit. Get over yourself.
I had offers from a bunch of companies, many of whom are much more highly respected by the group-think-drunk Slashdot community than Microsoft. Which full time offer did I take? Microsoft. Did they pay me more? Nope. Were their benefits better as a whole? Maybe. Is it the best company you can work for in the software industry if you can get over the "OMG!@# It's Micro$oft and that's evil" ideology that most 12 year old script kiddies hold? Yep.
I have no problem with you being a fan of Linux. I am too. In fact, I'm typing this message on a years-old IBM Thinkpad 600 running Slackware 10.0. However, I ask that just for one second, you take a step back from your own ideology. You can do one of two things. You can either admit that for all its flaws Microsoft makes a bunch of pr
MS released RC1 so that companies can test their internal applications and get themselves ready for the final showdown of SP2. But what they did instead? I guess they were just walking around in IT Dept. and drinking their coffee and browsing slashdot, in the hope that MS gets bankrupted before they release SP2 so IBM guys don't need to patch and fix their internal applications.
In our company of 300 employees, we tested SP2 way back to RC1 and from almost 14 days before , we were totally ready for the final release of SP2.
You should do the same