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IP: Last in series.A CASE IN POINT -- Dangers of U.S. Cyber Chief to Map Infra structure for Security and forces patches down our throats (see last para)
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 06 Dec 2001 10:02:22 -0500
Point made. The idea suggested by the WH is a nightmare in the making. djf
From: "Hungerford, Brian" <bhungerf () umich edu> The most recent security patch blew one of our servers out of the water on Thanksgiving Eve (fortunately, we were able to rebuild in less than 3 hours). The patch worked on over a dozen other machines prior to that one; I suspect that the failure was due to an interaction with one of the two network card drivers (Compaq Netelligent), so maybe it was unique to that machine or model; maybe not. Maybe the driver wasn't up to date, or some other patch from a different vendor should have been applied first. Who knows? When security patches are being shoved out the door under pressure, and there are literally millions of possible hardware configurations out there, things like this are going to happen. No matter how careful a vendor might be, you simply can't anticipate or test all the possibilities (cf., Michael Crichton's "Jurassic Park"). >Brian David Hungerford (MCSE) >Workstation & Network Administrator II >MAIS Workstation & Network Support >The University of Michigan
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- IP: Last in series.A CASE IN POINT -- Dangers of U.S. Cyber Chief to Map Infra structure for Security and forces patches down our throats (see last para) David Farber (Dec 06)