Please do not refer to Microsoft lackies as gnomes it is a detriment to the outstanding work that goes on for the gnome project.

Find out more at http://www.gnome.org and come at see all us devs and users at http://www.guadec.org next week in birmingham!

As far as I am aware the .NET 2.0 patch has the potential to get as large as 75Mb, which is a little large to be calling a 'patch' - 'replacement' would be closer

Am I wrong here or is anyone else seeing the same thing?

This brings the potential total size of patches to around 90Mb for our machines. Considering we use WSUS with the BITS bandwidth hog this starts to cause real problems for our network on far flung sites

If I'm right no doubt others are going to have similar problems and will have to delay patching as well. Effectivly by just dumping such a huge patch on us Microsoft have left us out in the cold with our pants down with a big 'vulnerable' sign around our necks

Cheers Redmond

I'm always of the opinion that no matter how bad the patch is, its probably not as bad as running off a BDC for a week while you rebuild half the network because you couldn't pull the plug on the comms cupboard fast enough.

Rare, but not impossible.

So gnomes are trademarked now ? Will the madness never end ?

Gnome sux dude, KDE 4 life :-)

@ Karl:

Honestly, if you were going to moan about the usage of the word "gnome", at least do so on behalf of short elf-like creatures. No, you had to ride into town on your high horse and preach the good word of the Gnome UI in a story about windows patches. Anyone who gives a crap about Gnome already knows about it. Give it up already.

Re: very large .NET patch complicates things

So it's now Microsoft's fault you have remote sites with inadequate infrastructure? It's Redmond's fault that you're choosing to delay patching your systems? Perhaps you'd prefer MS not repair vulnerabilities at all? You not having the resources to deploy the patch as fast as you want does not place onto Microsoft the burden of your inadequacy.

Isn't that the thing that looks like Win95 ?

I thought they gave up after KDE3 was out . . .

Since the automatic VIsta Update last night, my Outlook email does NOT show up under the Personal Folder/Sent Items folder! WTF? I uninstalled the MS updates but to no avail. What a genuine piece of shite this Vista is! My Outlook 2003 is correctly configured, so I am at a loss to explain let alone "fix" this problem. Anyone have a ideas here?

Michael: "So it's now Microsoft's fault you have remote sites with inadequate infrastructure?"

Yes, actually, it is. I have several MS machines and a couple of Linux machines at home... and an ADSL line. But I'm one of the "lucky" ones in Australia. In a country as large as the continental US but with only a fraction of the population, many live in areas where dial-up is the only way to go... and if you get above 28.8, you're doing well (thanks to Telstra's "we only have to provide lines good enough for voice" attitude). My parents - who live about 1 hour (by highway, admitedly) from the centre of the state's capital - regularly get barely above 14.4.

Not everyone has access to T1, cable or fast-ADSL. And MS is hard at work selling Windows to Mr and Mrs EveryDay. So, yes, it's up to them to make sure that their product can eb upgraded by the very same people they're foisting it on.

For folks with no choice but to use either limited bandwidth or high bandwidth/metered download capacity, a 100MB 'patch' (or ‘replacement as someone mentioned) download is not at all welcome.

Still, there is no apologist like a Microsoft apologist

Michael do me a favour and move over and let the grown ups talk

“So it's now Microsoft's fault you have remote sites with inadequate infrastructure?”

Of course it isn’t and in an ideal world we would all have limitless resources to do whatever we want. In the real world however you try requesting a couple of million dollars to upgrade the network everywhere to the spec required once per month for Microsoft patches, if they are going to continue with this sort of thing. The network is fine for business use all month and just craps out when we approve large MS patches.

“It’s Redmond's fault that you're choosing to delay patching your systems?”

Actually yes it is- the size of the patches means we have to try to drip feed them somehow and the inadequacies of the WSUS patch mechanism do not allow for the multiple overlapping grouping we need to be able to do this effectively.

The BITS service which will try every so cleverly on your single home machine to not swamp your single PC network is crap at this on large networks -multiple machines join together and consume as much bandwidth as they can.

Add to that an enormous patch which also has seemingly several documented issues installing and yes it’s Microsoft’s fault that we have to patch slowly and carefully – our business does not exist solely to patch machines, it exists to do business

“Perhaps you'd prefer MS not repair vulnerabilities at all?”

Of course I wouldn’t – but a little more work to roll out a more streamlined patch which doesn’t have so many bugs would be appreciated, this one seems almost as rushed as a zero day patch

“You not having the resources to deploy the patch as fast as you want does not place onto Microsoft the burden of your inadequacy.”

As already stated our network is quite adequate for our needs once we remove the burden of huge patches resulting from Microsoft’s inadequacy

In general there are a lot more people out there with a lot more complex problems than your home PC (and yeah I know it’s a state of the art haxorz beast) or dinky work network.

When the PCs I manage in a remote location in a jungle somewhere and the PCs others have mentioned get infected, end up part of a botnet and start attacking your machine who are you going to whine to then fanboy? Or did you not think that far ahead?

Rollout of patches in this manner doesn’t just impact those who don’t have infinite resources – it impacts you too, nice huh?

Anyway – is anyone aware of a simple tool or similar for assessing how much of the 75Mb patch each machine needs so we can better plan a gradual rollout?, just a thought