Yesterday, for reasons unknown, our entire network dragged to a crawl around midday. Those reasons became quite clear this morning when word hit the blogosphere (here, here, and here, among others) that Microsoft had pulled another fast one on us network admins and rammed a patch down our throats, bypassing the normal WSUS approval process. Apparently, the Windows Installer update pushed out a few weeks ago makes this possible

The patch in question was a major version relese to Windows Desktop Search, which is categorized in WSUS as an “Update”. Our WSUS machine is configured to auto-approve critical patches, but not routine updates. Imagine my surprise when I find that it is already in the “approved” category and has installed itself on all of our machines. Between the time it synced and the time it pushed out to the machines, I hadn’t gone near the WSUS machine to approve it…

And Microsoft’s PR flacks are telling us that those of us who did get the patch had already approved it. Nice try, Microsoft. I and hundreds of other admins have a far different story to tell.

The least they could do is warn us this was coming, so that we could test it. Instead, we had 200 machines sitting there, reindexing themselves while people were trying to get things done.

I like WSUS, generally, it makes my job a lot easier when it comes to managing the patches that Microsoft constantly needs to issue – but it really ticks me off when they abuse the system for their own self-serving goals.

I’d be willing to bet a donut that this somehow breaks Google Desktop. Micrsoft has a long track record of dirty tricks when they feel squeezed by the competition… anyone remember Win32 v1.32? the patch from 1.31 did very little, except for one key thing… it completely broke OS/2 compatibility with 32-bit Windows applications. Any 32-bit app written with 1.32 or later was unable to function with the 1.31 libraries that you could install on OS/2.