Dude, if you are so swamped with 50 systems, of which you are only responsible for 6, and you can't find an hour to test a patch before rolling it into production, you might want to look for a new gig. Have you considered a career with WalMart. I hear they're hiring greeters. I think that might be the low stress job you've been looking for.
Your own actions caused your problem. I don't care how swamped you are. You don't deploy ANYTHING in a production environment without reading all of the release notes and testing it. Further, when a patch has been out as long as this one has, you have no excuse at all for being stuck with a gotcha. Next thing you're going to tell us is the documentation for your servers consists of a printout of some brain dumps from an ExamCram site, right? Remember, you didn't have an hour to test with, so where on earth are you going to find time to document your network. BTW, you are whining. You can call it whatever you like, but it is still whining. If you don't like working with Microsoft products, you have a very easy choice to make. Update your resume with your high quality experience, and go send it to all the shops still running Pine. I'm sure you'll fit in just fine there. Tom. PS.- As far as you lack of a support contract or help, might I suggest a credit card and a call to PSS when you are stumped. That is until the Pine gig or WalMart comes through for you. -----Original Message----- From: Shawn Connelly [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2001 2:30 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe You know, it astounds me that so many IT people are blind to Microsoft's incompetence! BTW Mike, your 'car head light' analogy is not even relevant. A more apt analogy would refer to the Ford Pinto's with the exploding gas tanks. Sure the user could be mindful of driving only on roads with no other vehicles, thereby preventing a back-end collision. The 'solution' in service patch 2 could be likened to Microsoft removing the gas tank altogether. First, I read about 70% of the material related to this service patch. There are about 20 pages of material relating to this patch and since I run a dept. with over 50 systems and 6 servers ON MY OWN (no help, not even support contracts), I really don't have the time (nor is it humanly possible) to read every patch/update/security document produced by Microsoft alone (to say nothing about the 50+ other products I look after). No, I'm not whining!! Simply put, this patch broke Outlook!! An email program that cannot accept .com and .exe's is damaged! Yes, yes, I know there are other methods of receiving files (such as zip'ed) but the point is that no other email program such as Eudora, Groupwise, Netscape block these attachments. All Microsoft had to do was to either disable the dangerous capabilities of .asp,.vbs, (et al) code OR entirely block access to this code. IT WAS AS SIMPLE AS THAT!! Geezz, what's with some of you in this (supposed to be?) friendly discussions group? I sent a message asking about this (yes, I admit it was confrontational) and I read return responses basically calling me an idiot based on inane assumptions! Of course, I had to risk installing this patch because the risk of an Outlook-based virus outbreak out weighted the potential annoyance of breaking Outlook. BTW, I have never experienced a virus outbreak in the 6 years I've been with this company because of my pro-active stance on these issues. Message to Lori: "Project Plan and Test Plan Results"??? For such a typically minor patch? How many IT people do you have in your organization? The last time I had the time to do anything like that was in 98/99 for Y2K. I'm beginning to feel very small; am I the only IT person in this discussion group with an IT budget less than my wage? Message to Andy David: See note about inane assumptions. Over and out, Shawn -----Original Message----- From: Exchange Discussions digest [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: November 6, 2001 1:00 AM To: exchange digest recipients Subject: exchange digest: November 05, 2001 Subject: RE: Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe at tach ments From: "Mike Carlson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2001 09:38:28 -0600 X-Message-Number: 38 It amazes me when people complain about this patch. First developers wanted the ability to autmoate/script everything to customize it for their environment. "Give us the tools! Give us the ability!" Well Microsoft did. Now that users and administrators are too stupid, yes I mean stupid, to be mindful of attachments and security issues, they now blame Microsoft for releasing a buggy product. Its like blaming a car company, when you get rear-ended, for your brake lights being out. Similarily, the current crap about IIS being insecure is the same situation. If the system administrators would apply patches when they come out, and properly configure the machines, they would have no problems. When a company like Microsoft has to write into their application a security process that the administrators should do themselves, you have no one to blame but moron users and incompetant administrators. No one in our company had the ability, except admins, to open .exe, .vbs, wsh files from Outlook before they released the patch. We have a policy that everything must be in .zip or other compressed archive format like .sit or .tar. This way we can limit the vulnerabilites we have. People want it easy to use and administer. With that comes responsibility. If you cant take responsibility, you do not deserve your job. BTW: A company I do development for, fired 2 administrators because they got hacked by Code Red and Nimda. They were too stupid and incompetent to install patches that had been out for quite a long time. So again, blame stupid users and lazy administrators, not Microsoft. Also, if you blindly install patches and fixes without reading the documentation first and then testing the patches, your job should be on shakey ground. -----Original Message----- From: Hunter, Lori [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]=20 Sent: Monday, November 05, 2001 8:50 AM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe at tach ments Sue Mosher and I (and so many many others) made it a personal goal to speak ill of this patch whenever possible. In fact, we only refer to it as the Hell Patch. Not sure who coined that one but it does fit. So Shawn, can you show me your Project Plan and Test Plan Results for the application of this patch in a production environment? Or did you just blindly apply it and are now here to get your money back? No soup for you. NEXT!! -----Original Message----- From: Andy David [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, November 02, 2001 8:16 PM To: Exchange Discussions Subject: RE: Outlook blocked access to the following potentially unsafe at tach ments Ahhh, I love it.. If you had bothered to do even a little research before applying the SP you would have known this... But of course, it's Microsoft's fault. _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________________ List posting FAQ: http://www.swinc.com/resource/exch_faq.htm Archives: http://www.swynk.com/sitesearch/search.asp To unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Exchange List admin: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
