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How often do you check?

What are your IT pain points?

How would you like some free advice?

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Well I’ve just been on the phone to MS financing and they have confirmed that the requirement for 35% of the financing deal to be Microsoft products.

It’s a biggie (around 350MB) but addresses nearly 700 bugs and security updates. Among the highlights of new features is the support for Blu-ray discs, updated support for Bluetooth v2.1 and support for the exFAT file system providing handling of larger file sizes. There are improvements to the efficiency of the power management features which could help reduce overall power consumption. SP2 also fixes Wi-Fi issues when Vista awakes from sleep mode, and boosts performance of the Vista desktop sidebar gadget.

As ever with our patch management process we will be testing it in-house first before even considering deploying it to our managed service clients. Watch this space for gotcha’s!

As with all significant release like this it may be prudent to hang back from installation unless you have a need for one of the fixes. There have been reports of a few deployment issues related to specific combinations of packages on the problem systems. One such issue is fixed with this patch.

The Office Watch website has some good information on all this stuff. Also check out this link for a good run down on the content. You can also find the SP2 download here.

Security experts such as Symantec’s Peter Coogan and CA’s Don DeBolt, along with pontificators from all over the blogosphere are saying there may be a new variant released on April Fools Day as is a favoured day for such events.

Here’s is a link to the Microsoft patch: Microsoft Security Bulletin MS08-067 – Critical

Get it, install it. Also make sure your Malware protection suite is current and your backups are good.

Time to “batten down the hatches” or simply get the umbrella out? I guess we may well see tomorrow!

Good luck for Sunday Phil.

This time it’s Microsoft Excel’s turn to make the news (read about it here). Microsoft have issued a security advisory on the issue. Regardless of the general feelings that get voiced about Microsoft’s software security they have a very structured approach to dealing with these issues that a lot of other companies could learn from. In fact Microsoft didn’t even feature in the recent (20/02/09) WServerNews list of latest vulnerabilities generated from the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures site. Fortunately for us Symantec have spotted this one first and undoubtedly will have a trigger for it in their latest definition update.

However I digress from the point of this post. I don’t want to discusss th relative security merits, or not, inherent in software, what I want to bring your attention to is the way in which you deal with these issues.

Finding the vulnerabilities and producing supporting evidence (tests, proofs and documents) is a full time job for a large number of companies and organisations. Digesting that information - regularly - can be as much as a full time job, let alone understanding the information provided. Who has time to do this along-side their core business? As one element of what we do in our supporting role there is a finite amount of time even we can spend on this subject.

So how does your business deal with issues like this?

More to follow…

It looks as though the AutoCAD update 2 causes the software to crash frequently!  Autodesk have released another update (2.01) to replace the original version 2.0 update.  Another point to note is that the software and the Add/Remove programs list reports the original faulty update (2.00) as English Version 3.

This is text taken from a discussion found at the Autodesk website
http://discussion.autodesk.com/forums/message.jspa?messageID=6050093

Straight from the mouth of Autodesk: uninstall update 2.

“Early this morning I was made aware of a new change request that is tracking incidences of random crashes like your’s in AutoCAD LT 2009 after Update 2 has been applied. Currently we are rapidly receiving error reports ranging from New Zealand to the UK at the current rate of 37 reports over the past 24 hours.

Development is asking for a reproducible case to unravel what the root cause is. If you can reliably duplicate the conditions where the crash occurs that we can relay to development, please send details. Otherwise, you should uninstall the Update 2 that appears as “AutoCAD LT 2009 - English Version 3″ in the Add or Remove Program applet until we can correct the problems you’ve been seeing.

We apologize for the inconvenience. This has become a hot issue that development is actively attempting to resolve.”