On a home or desktop PC, uptime isn’t really too much of an issue. Of course it’s irritating when your PC crashes while you’re doing something, but worst case scenario is that you have to pop downstairs for a coffee.
On a server, however, this isn’t the case. I’m talking Windows here, because that’s the system I received this message on last week:
Now, I don’t want to be seeing this unexpectedly. I understand the need that certain updates may require a reboot (well, mostly understand…), but surely the default should be that I get to chose when the reboot happens!?! I’m no server expert, so there may be ways around this, but this particular server was running for UAT purposes, so when my UAT Team tell me things aren’t working and I logon to find this, I’m not happy.
Is there a way to stop this happening? I’m not talking about the Windows Update settings, because that requires you to logon, and if you have a lot of servers (especially in a multi-VM environment) you don’t really want to have to logon to each one to get the windows updates sorted. Especially if you plan for this to happen overnight.
Neil Barnwell
You can change the updates to “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them”. That’s what I do, it automatically downloads the updates and you just get a notification “yellow shield” in the system tray informing you that updates are ready to install. You can then choose when to do it, ideally “out of hours”. You should also choose “Custom Install” to avoid installing anything you don’t want or need.
Comment by Antony Scott — April 10, 2008 @ 10:33 am