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Microsoft Quietly Releases Windows 2003 SP2
Several readers noted that Microsoft has quietly released 32-bit Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 for download. (The 64-bit edition is still showing as a release candidate on the site.) The installation of SP2 may potentially regress hotfixes that have been deployed previously; Microsoft has released a script to scan for hotfixes that may potentially regress.
Some of you are asking what made this release so "quiet".
What happened is in the black of night Ballmer, dressed in his ninja outfit, shimmied along the walls of the MS datacenter with a CD with this service pack on. He used his glass-cutters to silently sneak through a window, and snuck up into the vent before guards could see. Using a series of mirrors to deflect the trip-lasers he then lowered himself down from a vent grate, and uploaded the Windows 2003 service pack onto the server.
Why was it released so quietly? Who knows, but I'm sure there's something evil at work here. Thanks to the submitter for pointing out that this release was suspiciously quiet.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I don't like mindless pro-Linux droning either, but personally I prefer to deal with small updates every day, which are very unlikely to affect anything, than a traumatic experience every month which is rather likely to affect something, where you'll have no idea which of the bundled hotfixes are doing the damage.
Also you have to balance out the bonus of having the bug/security hole fixed immediately; shouldn't it be done right away to avoid worse problems?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
But those tests are only so lengthy and expensive because just about anything can change. If you know that there's a change in Samba, you only have to test the things that depend on Samba, you don't have to retest everything in the system. The fact that you have to test so many things when you upgrade is just a microsoft thing. There isn't a lot of things that break if your patch consists of actually just fixing a single, or small number of bugs.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Good to see Microsoft is still releasing service packs for Server 2003. However, I really want to see SP3 for XP. Building an XP box, even from SP2 media, requires over 75 patches in our environment! It takes nearly 50 minutes of cranking every time we have to build a new master disk image. Not all of us upgrade instantly.
It's nice that Microsoft makes the patches available separately. For those who don't do it, you wouldn't believe how much work it is testing patches and narrowing down which one broke an application. However, I think they should have one monster rollup available at least every few months. Most of that 50 minutes is spent dependency-resolving, isolating and backing up the files that each patch replaces. Doing that once is better than 75 times.
One thing I don't like about MS is that they tend to abandon customers who can't or won't upgrade to the next version of a product. I'd love to be on IE7, but we're stuck on 6 until several dependencies get fixed. I'm not too wild about Vista, but know that we have to go that way in the next year or so just to ensure we get the latest security fixes. Microsoft guarantees they'll backport fixes for a while, but you can bet they're doing all the active research on Vista. I can't agree with people who say they should still support NT, but most of the enterprise-class vendors have a much more lenient upgrade policy. (OpenVMS is at least kind of supported 3 versions back, IIRC.)
A number of companies have applications which are only supported by the vendor at selected patchlevels, with no other software allowed. Microsoft releasing large collection of patches as service packs makes the job of vetting various hardware and software configurations easier. Its easier for a vendor to state that their application runs on Windows 2003 SP2, rather than Windows 2003, with a large amount of patch numbers needed.
Plus, (IMHO of course), it was time for a service pack for Windows 2003 anyway.
More to the point, if I see an update come through on Ubuntu that is for "gnome-desktop-calendar" then I can be pretty sure that even if it is borked, it won't bork my entire system, and even if it does, I will know where to look in order to fix it.
On the flip side, if I apply W2K_SP2.exe to my server and something breaks I have a much more difficult time identifying the problem and often the best short term course of action is to roll back the entire service pack.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Actually, I can think of a dozen different ways it would.
You're talking about going from one MAJOR kernel version to a different MAJOR kernel version.
Why would you deploy a MAJOR change on production servers without massive testing?
A "service pack" would be more like lib-foo_2.1.2 going to lib-foo_2.1.3.
Which is different than going to lib-foo_2.2.0.
Which is far different from going to lib-foo_3.0.0.
Which is far different from going to kernel 2.6.x from kernel 2.4.x.
Okay, it's unlikely a bugfix to the color management subsystem is going to affect the accounting program, but when millions of dollars over tens of thousands of workstations are potentially affected, are you going to take that risk?
Big corporates aren't; not with that level of money on the line. Each patch causes everything to be restested, it doesn't matter HOW big or small the patch is. Bigger patches save time, overall, because that means there's fewer of them meaning (per year) less time spent testing. Less headaches for IT depts too, because there's less patches for them to tick off and keep track of.
Small and frequent patches are a huge sinkhole of time for an IT department.
See, I'd rather test my programs against a single "march 2007" update than having to test against all the different possible bugfixes that accumulated during march. Doing daily updates as you speak makes for a huge effort just to stay in the same place.
Also, the one big patch lets me read mailing lists and find out what other corporates have done. If a huge multinational runs into an issue with a SP, I know that I have to be careful with that SP even though my company is a ten thousandath of the size. But a minor update? There's not going to be enough weight to that for me to hear about issues it causes.
Yes, I know, there are times that patches need to be expidited due to security issues, which I can live with.