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Practice effective patch management

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by debate

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How do you stay on top of patches for your Windows network? Does your organization use Windows Update, or do you use another method? How would you rate your organization's patch management? Share your comments about staying on top of patch management, as discussed in the March 26 Security Solutions e-newsletter.

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http://nl.com.com/acct_mgmt.jsp?brand=techrepublic

4 replies

by walker_

We set up our own patch server with IIS\WU and pointed the clients to it. It ran fine for about a month, then suddenly the clients couldn't find it anymore. After MANY hours of fruitless troubleshooting we uninstalled and reinstalled WU and downloaded the whole 200 MB of patches again.
Another month went by and the same thing happened again.
We uninstalled WU, downloaded a trial version of HFNetChkPro by Shavlik and haven't looked back.

by mike mullins

Personally, I've had nothing but failure with this *free* offering from MS. Maybe that's why it's free. HFNetChkPro has several quirks, but it does do the job (most of the time).

by aperminter

PatchLink is a SERVICE bundled with a SOFTWARE deployment application that truly eliminates known software vulnerabilities quickly and reliably by AUTOMATING the patch management process. PatchLink covers non-Windows based systems too, and it?s been the quickest and most reliable way for me to deploy security patches to desktops and servers.

by alfaep

I've found out that as a consultant for many of my clients, the Windows Update function solves many general issues that could be time consuming for me to find out.
But something happened once: One of my customers performed a "refresh" installation of Win98SE on a computer that had a dead battery. So, the time and date were settled somewher on year 2001 or so. I didn't noticed and then I arrived to optimize the PC... Of course, I ran Win Update. After that I noticed the date of the PC and fixed it. Several days later, I performed a Win Update again but had trouble on it because the SSL secure conection does not allow the scan if more than 100 days have past. I don't like that... but it gives me also the doubt about how much a computer could be tracked by MS.
I just wanted to share this.
After all, the online support from MS gave me the hint, but I also noticed that some other strange things happen over troubleshooting Win Update, that I was not aware of... There's always a way of course.

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