David Stone's Blog

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More on Automatic Updates

Of course, this is always how viruses end up coming in to the office, some machine on the network that no one ever uses, so patches never get installed... You think we would have got smart after nimda... nah... when it comes to machines we rarely use, we are just as lazy as the admins who don't patch their servers.

[Jesse Ezell's Blog]

Funny you should mention this...because I just solved this problem last night. After my post yesterday, I wanted to see if there was a way for Automatic Updates to be installed...get this...automatically. ;) So when I got home, I went to Start|Control Panel|Automatic Updates (on Win2k, in Win2k3 the place to go is Start|Control Panel|System|Automatic Updates) , and up popped the configuration window with the “Hey, how do you want this thing to run?” options:

The funny thing is, I had never noticed the third option: automatically download and install the updates on a specific schedule! w00t! This was just what I needed because my parents leave their computer on all night anyway, so I set it to download and install at 3AM every day. Pretty nifty...and now my mother never needs to install another update, they'll be done before she ever wakes up. Very cool.

Comments

Dave said:

Now if only there was a 4th option... when a PC is rarely used and serves only one function (we have a W2k box the has the only license for our COBOL compiler that is used 8 times a year for PeopleSoft updates), the machine should check for updates do not allow the user to do anything until all are completed.

Not entirely feasable I know, but still a wish-list item! Hell, forget about it, let's just wish for a tightly secure OS impervious to any outside attacks! LOL.

Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about this either.
# August 13, 2003 1:26 PM

Cory Smith said:

Yeah, but keep in mind that I think this only works for critical updates. I would like an additional option to select the other categories of updates as well (windows update, driver updates).
# August 25, 2003 2:44 PM
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