… and the Windows Update Team Rejoices
August 21, 2007
I hadn’t read much about the Skype outage, but I did catch a quick bit that their stock price took a big hit.
Then today, I caught a post on Wired’s Epicenter blog titled “Skype: Microsoft Patches Were ‘Catalyst’ Not ‘Root Cause’ for Outage“. I thought this was going to be a case where a patch caused a problem in Skype’s back-end servers, which took the network down.
It wasn’t.
In “What happened on August 16” on the Skype Blog, Villu Arak explains that:
The disruption was triggered by a massive restart of our users’ computers across the globe within a very short timeframe as they re-booted after receiving a routine set of patches through Windows Update.
Of course I’m not happy that Skype had a problem, but I bet that the Microsoft Update Team is happy to hear that they were the cause. If nothing else, this goes to show that a whole lot of computers are now set to automatically download and install critical updates as they become available. Maybe we can start whittling away at the bot-nets.
More Reading:
“The Microsoft connection clarified” - Skype Blog
“Skype: Microsoft zombie network launched DoS attack” - Skype-Watch.com
“Microsoft Update Caused the Great Skype Outage” - Blog Nation
Also on Port 16:
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August 21st, 2007 at 9:05 pm
This is one of many things that really irk me about the folks in Seattle. On our network alone performance takes a major dip whenever there is a major update. Seems like to me that there ought to be some “not muck it up” department in the corp working to develop rolling updates over the course of 48 to 72 hours instead of all at once. OK, I’m done ranting. I do greatly appreciate the explanation. I hadn’t picked-up on the latest news on the outage. That’s really helpful. Thanks amigo.
August 21st, 2007 at 9:14 pm
No problem Phil.
I’m not sure how big your shop is, but you should ask IT to check into Windows Update Services. It’s basically a free server that will download the updates, and redistribute them.
IT then uses group policy to control the settings. Just off the top of my head, here are a couple of really nice reasons to use it.
1. It’s free
2. Updates are downloaded from Microsoft 1 time. After that, the server distributes them to the clients. Just the saved bandwidth may be reason enough.
3. Updates can be selectively approved or disapproved.
4. Approval or disapproval can be given for user defined groups of computers.
5. Computers check in with the update server, and reports can be pulled to see what computers haven’t been updated yet, or what computers are receiving errors updating.
#4 is also nice because there can be a group of test workstations or servers, and IT can roll the patches out to them the first day they are available, then if there are no problems, they can be rolled out to the rest of the company.
I really love WSUS server. I need to install the new version.
August 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 am
I worked with Mike at the time when we set up the Windows Update Services server. It is really nice. Mike already gave a pretty good rundown on it so I can’t really add anything.
Just wanted to chime in with something inane only so I can be included with this conversation.