Remember the SBS 2003 Server I was taking over from another consultant that hadn’t been updated in 2+ years?
Yeah, flawless updating through all 5 SBS 2003 SP1 updates, Server 2003 SP2, Exchange SP2 and WSS SP2, as well as the accompanying 39+ patches after all the SP’s were in. Side effect of all the patching? Server now runs way snappier and I look kingly to the business.
The previous consultants departing gift was an update to their Linux firewall that hadn’t been updated in a year. End result was a firewall that ate itself during the upgrade and a forced reinstall of the entire box. The worst part of the botched upgrade was it happened at the beginning of business hours on Friday so the business was without internet until I could get in and pop a router into place until the other consultant could get onsite and reload the Linux box. The previous consultant is a friend of mine, so of course, I had a field day giving him a hard time.
The SBS 2003 update process took ~13 hours start to finish. 7 hours of that was a full backup of the server before I started the process, so ~6 hours for all the service packs and patches to go in. Part of that time was also dedicated to clearing out the Exchange queues of all the spam that had resided there for over a year after they got hit while using Exchange as their mail server. Once I get the chance to show them the beauty of Direct Push, I believe I can get them to swap back over and get them subbed to ExchangeDefender run by the (in)famous Vlad Mazek.
I did have the foresight of knowing that the Server 2003 SP2 caused issues if the NIC drivers were old, so that was the very first thing updated once the Server was taken down for a good cleaning out and put back online. I’m sure you’d like to hear about having to work around quirks that popped up during the updates, but there were absolutely none. Completely flawless start to finish. The previous consultant, being mostly Linux based, was highly impressed with the speed of the machine after updating. Security isn’t the only reason you should patch.
All in all, a win for the Windows Server product and a black-eye for the Linux product in the eyes of the business. Can’t say I’m unhappy about that.
Tags: Microsoft SBS 2003 SP1 SP2 Exchange ExchangeDefender Linux Firewall Patch
