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Story: Microsoft upgrade knocks out 80,000 government PCs

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Well, there aren't really enough details for comment on this piece. Did the 'update' cause a problem because of bad programming in the 3rd party software? Did the 'update' change some default access settings and cause the failure ? That would be bad -- if access is too lax that's still the sysadmin's problem, not the OS supplier -- the OS shouldn't simply clamp down on an automated update because there's a very good chance that things will break. (Anyone remember the MS article about how XP ServicePack2 will break a large % of apps?) How was the problem resolved -- was it a 'rollback' of the offending update? Sure this is a major cock-up but it's far from clear who's to blame on this one, nor it is really possible to assure that an MS update of any sort won't break something -- there are a lot of bad programs out there. The question that remains is: what sensible sysadmin would use automated updates in this fashion? I only have a handful of pet computers, but I have a test machine which is subjected to updates before they're rolled out to the other machines.

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