Automatic Updates are Bad, See Skype
Out of Arstechnica today. It appears that Windows’ patch tuesday on August 14th brought Skype to a grinding halt. I don’t use the automatic updates at work, well things like this can happen, plus you always want control over what is updating on your computer(s).
“With so many machines restarting, Skype says the network was sunk into a vicious cycle of deprivation, wherein rebooting machines would attempt to log on to the Skype network, but so many machines were rebooting that the network was unable to meet demand. “
I’m glad they found the bug and hopefully came up with a solution for this in the future.
This comes down to an issue of trust. Do you trust Microsoft? No, I don’t. I’ve had updates break drivers before, FUBAR things, and so forth. In a perfect world you would want to install updates in a lab environment. Then you could have a little reassurance that it would run in the work environment.
We don’t live in a perfect world and things can be rolled back. I guess it all depends on the scale of your company. I couldn’t imagine rolling back everyone of our computers at work. That would be an entire day or more of work.
So I think Automatic Updates is good in theory, but in practice I think it is a very bad idea. IT is about control and you have to control your technology.
I remember when Service Pack 2 dropped for XP. Not a fun experience in the IT world. We now have planned days for the updates and to allow them to “ripen” for a bit.
Brent: I’m with ya’. Some of our departments (not mine thankfully) got burned by Microsoft “patches” a couple of years ago that resulted in server crashes. We now have procedures in place to perform extensive testing.
Thanks for dropping by. I’ve been away for a bit but will return soon with some updated stuff. Later.
I so agree with you. I am completely against any kind of automatic updates. The more unknowns you let into your computer, the more problems you are going to have, IMO.
I work for a web hosting company that provides a “wysiwyg” editor for the clients sites. That editor doesn’t work in IE7. Thankfully my company is smart and doesn’t allow auto updates. Unfortunately, our 30,000+ clients aren’t that smart. It took about 3 months to fix the issue, and we are still getting clients calling in about the issue to this day. We have since rolled out an newer version that works with IE7, but the majority of our clients are still on the older version using a user agent string utility to work around the issue.
Good post, I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that give full trust to M$ on their auto updates.