As the title says last week I upgraded about 200 of our existing Windows XP SP1 machines to SP2 using SUS. I wanted to take this opportunity to report how things worked for me so those of you looking to deploy SP2 in larger number or those who believe that SP2 is "evil" (you know who you are) know what it looks like when upgrades are done in larger numbers.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with SUS it's basically a web server that caches updates available off the Windows Update site and than makes it available for local machines. The update process for the individual machines is no different than if they had downloaded the update directly from Microsoft using the Automatic Updates client.
I've seen that there are a number of machines out there that have had issues post SP2 and expected to have a few problems so I've been cautious before releasing (as is the case with every service pack, but especially this time due to the nature of SP2 and that this is the first time I've done a SP update with SUS).
I'm sure some of you are interested in how many machines the upgrade "hosed". I?m happy to report that only 1 machine did not survive the upgrade. We had one machine that after the SP2 install would not boot (blue-screens on the boot, unable to recover in safe mode or recovery console; ended up getting rebuilt by our support guy at that site). We also had 3 installs that got messed up by the users powering the systems off during the install (yes physically powering the system down in the middle of the SP install); the good news is that all of these systems were recoverable by booting them into the recovery console and following the directions in 875355 to get them running using the SP1 files and than we were able to uninstall the botched SP2 install and reinstall it correctly. All things considered it was much quieter than I expected (after all a 99.5% success rate is pretty good).
Obviously my environment is not going to be the same as everyone else?s and I still recommend that you evaluate applying any new code to a running environment (MS patch or otherwise) before you simply run it.
So for those of you who have been avoiding installing SP2 in fear that it?s going to break your existing systems I hope this gives you a better idea of success rates. There is that handful of people out there who are complaining that they?ve had a bad time with SP2. The reason we keep ?hearing so much? is because the majority of the people who aren?t having problems are simply not running out to sites like this and reporting on their successes.
Good Luck,
Erik
For those of you who are unfamiliar with SUS it's basically a web server that caches updates available off the Windows Update site and than makes it available for local machines. The update process for the individual machines is no different than if they had downloaded the update directly from Microsoft using the Automatic Updates client.
I've seen that there are a number of machines out there that have had issues post SP2 and expected to have a few problems so I've been cautious before releasing (as is the case with every service pack, but especially this time due to the nature of SP2 and that this is the first time I've done a SP update with SUS).
I'm sure some of you are interested in how many machines the upgrade "hosed". I?m happy to report that only 1 machine did not survive the upgrade. We had one machine that after the SP2 install would not boot (blue-screens on the boot, unable to recover in safe mode or recovery console; ended up getting rebuilt by our support guy at that site). We also had 3 installs that got messed up by the users powering the systems off during the install (yes physically powering the system down in the middle of the SP install); the good news is that all of these systems were recoverable by booting them into the recovery console and following the directions in 875355 to get them running using the SP1 files and than we were able to uninstall the botched SP2 install and reinstall it correctly. All things considered it was much quieter than I expected (after all a 99.5% success rate is pretty good).
Obviously my environment is not going to be the same as everyone else?s and I still recommend that you evaluate applying any new code to a running environment (MS patch or otherwise) before you simply run it.
So for those of you who have been avoiding installing SP2 in fear that it?s going to break your existing systems I hope this gives you a better idea of success rates. There is that handful of people out there who are complaining that they?ve had a bad time with SP2. The reason we keep ?hearing so much? is because the majority of the people who aren?t having problems are simply not running out to sites like this and reporting on their successes.
Good Luck,
Erik
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