Windows: ECN Patch Management System

NOTICE : Reboots will be moved to Wednesday Night/Thursday morning at the end of the Spring 2008 Semester.  The first day this will take effect is the evening of May 14th/ Morning of May 15th, 2008.

As some you may have noticed, ECN reboots all the Windows OS Clients we support about once a week. You may also have noticed that it is usually on Wednesday nights/ Thursday Morning, about 3:00AM. You may wonder why we do that.

We have implemented a Patch Management system for our Windows client machines. Every Wednesday night we apply any new patches that Microsoft has released during the past week. Unfortunately, most of these patches require a reboot of the machine to activate them. We have decided to reboot, by default, all machines which have been patched. This accounts for the Wednesday evening reboots.

Microsoft occasionally releases Urgent security patches during the course of the week which necessitate an immediate patch and reboot of our client machines. In those cases, we will automatically distrubute the patch to all the machines and reboot them without waiting for Wednesday evening.

ECN maintains a mailing list that provides email notification of impending patches and the expected time of installation. Anyone can subscribe to the list at the following URL:

https://engineering.purdue.edu/ECN/mailman/listinfo/epm-list

Once subscribed to this list, you will get weekly reminders of upcoming patches, as well a notification of any out-of-cycle patches we might need to send out to the Windows client machines.

Additionally, this mailing will provide you with a method to opt your computer out of getting patched and rebooted for any specific week. This will enable you to continue running long simulations or other computations which would be interrupted by the patch and reboot during the current week.

The exemption will only last for the upcoming patch application. It is not a permanent exemption!

We require that that your computer be patched at least every three weeks, in order to help us maintain the security of the network. This will allow you some flexibility with your computing needs, while allowing us to maintain your Operating System security.

Also, we will generally not allow exemptions for machines located in computer labs.

If you have any questions, please direct them to your Site Specialist, or to windows@ecn.purdue.edu.