The Microsoft ITMU issue...

Inventory Tool for Microsoft Updates: or how I spent the last 10 days in cyber-hell. I didn't think I'd ever need to know about "scan-wrappers" and "data-blobs" and slippery techs who deliberately give misleading information... until the last set of MS patches and subsequent fully legal builds of WINXP Pro. Boy-Howdy am I upset.

My tech people are good - very, very good. Seems we, like a half-million or so other users of fully legal software are getting "jammed" by the MS Updates scan-wrapper schtick... long story short 88 of 250 new machines were clean-loaded several times owing to this little update problem that sticks the CPU at 100% for extended periods of time - in one case 6.5 hours. I hate to think of how much coin this has cost our organization... easily tens of thousands... not to mention my the stress on our tech staff... Ever seen an MCSE cry? I have... and up till yesterday MS disavowed any knowledge of the issue to our organization.

We now know what's causing it... all but the fastest of machines and even some Duo-Core stuff are exhibiting this behaviour... one of my own personal machines (a brand new Twin Xeon 771 socket) had one CPU pegged for 30 minutes trying to parse the XML exchange between Windows Update and itself. We tried an experiment... we did a clean-load on identical machines and one was done using WU and one from discreet stand-alone patches... the "stand-alone" survived no problem... the other went unresponsive on the WU site and promptly corrupted it's installation in a big, unreparable way - blew out the crypto-keys and user dat - BAD CODE.

Folks'll start hearing about this soon... I just had it out with our MS sales rep... "Idiot-Boy" tried to blame our AV progs... sorry Sonny-Jim no such software on the affected machines as we can't get the builds done that far to apply any AV software... He'll not be allowed back in the building as his creds are wiped.

Seems an MS district sales manager wants to take me out for dinner... I got contracts in my "night-job" for some PC's and server stuff for the Canadian gov't - far North, middle of nowhere stuff - ' may just hafta load good old reliable BSD on the servers... the PC's will be MS WINXP Pro with the patches loaded "stand-alone". My techs assure me that it won't be long before some enterprising "gray-crew" starts there own site for stand-alone patches - and although I'm all-for 100% legal software - there are alternernatives when the legal solutions (bought and paid-for) don't work well.

Thanx,

V. Kaminski

Seems to me that Microsoft didn't think their cunning plan all the way through. Their anti-pirating shiatniz will end up turning half-million legal license owners into pirates out of disgust.

The gray-crew coming to the rescue right there: windowsupdate.62nds.com...

Always keep in mind that you're downloading Windows patches from a third party, stay alert. Though, Microsoft's own legit binaries do their share of damages alone anyway, fearing backdoors is futile at this point.

I always use the stand alone method, not that I have had any problems with the automatic updates, only I do not like to install things I do not know what they are.

Also, my updates are made only if needed, and that is something that only a human being can do.