On Thursday 14 March 2002 21:10, [C] Teodorski, Chris wrote: >From the article at http://www.eweek.com/article/0,3658,s%253D701%2526a%253D21023,00.asp
"Another IT professional, based in California, who runs Windows XP systems for testing purposes, said that after installing the latest batch of XP security patches on four systems running XP Professional, all the systems became unstable. " It isn't good idea to leave your servers nor workstations to automatically update anything, for one simple reason - you don't know what will happen to your system. While it is sometimes better to do automatic patching (if we're talking about antivirus software, for example), the example above, even if it isn't true, reflects on what could happen to the entire company. Microsoft has had fixes that broke things before, and this can happen to anyone, anytime. We're talking about system reliability, and no Windows, BSD, Linux or any other OS can protect you from automated procedure that install bad patch to hundreds of computers, rendering them less stable or even unusable until the vendor releases the fix to fix the fix. It is less headache for administrators, to have Microsoft update all these machines, but in the case they do something wrong - you won't get fired because it is clearly their mistake, but it might cost your company lot of money, and if you run heterogenous PC hardware, you might get all sorts of small but annoying problems. -- Radoslav Dejanovic Senior Associate to Mayor's Office City of Zagreb, Croatia
