Microsoft Quietly Releases Windows 2003 SP2

Several readers noted that Microsoft has quietly released 32-bit Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 for download. (The 64-bit edition is still showing as a release candidate on the site.) The installation of SP2 may potentially regress hotfixes that have been deployed previously; Microsoft has released a script to scan for hotfixes that may potentially regress.

Where is XP sp3?

even just a update roll up would be nice. When you install a new xp sp2 system there is a lot of updates that you need to.

Re:Where is XP sp3?

When you install a new xp sp2 system there is a lot of updates that you need to.

You should start with a fresh install of Vista first, there are a lot less patches available right now so it will go quicker. :-)

XP x64 as well

I fired up Windows Update on my XP Pro x64 rig today and it had a 350MB patch for me.

Didn't seem to change much, if anything.

WPA2 Support

At long last! Finally we can un-wire all those unsightly server rooms and start providing data in the same style that we consume it. I for one welcome our new servers-in-beds overlords.

Old News?

This being the intertubes and all, isn't this kind of old news? I am fairly certain our university upgraded their 2003 servers last week, even though the Microsoft published date reads 3/12/2007.

Re:Old News?

Just got off the phone with Digg and they want your middle-school ass back.

Where's my XP SP2b?

Seriously, I NEED an XP SP2b package (all updates up to IE7).

I'm not making a comment. I'm asking a serious question here! XP SP2b OEM disks are already being sold in stores.

Quietly?

> Microsoft Quietly Releases Windows 2003 SP2

Quietly releases?

Posting it here certainly made it a lot noisier.

What made this release so "quiet"?

Some of you are asking what made this release so "quiet".

What happened is in the black of night Ballmer, dressed in his ninja outfit, shimmied along the walls of the MS datacenter with a CD with this service pack on. He used his glass-cutters to silently sneak through a window, and snuck up into the vent before guards could see. Using a series of mirrors to deflect the trip-lasers he then lowered himself down from a vent grate, and uploaded the Windows 2003 service pack onto the server.

Why was it released so quietly? Who knows, but I'm sure there's something evil at work here. Thanks to the submitter for pointing out that this release was suspiciously quiet.

Re:ninja Ballmer

Squirt shurikens from /where/?

Re:What made this release so "quiet"?

To answer that question is simple, it's a server platform. If they did an SP update for XP or Vista (gawd knows they should hurry given all the problems), it would show up on ever web page they have. Since win2k3 was never meant to go to an average consumer, it's just not worth advertising through most mediums.

If that isn't a good enough answer, just look at the list of what's new...There's nothing of significant value, and all of the security/bug fixes are already addressed with regular critical updates. Who cares about this update? It's a 'value improvement' update at the very most.

Now for my question...why was this made into a slashdot article? Judging by the number of comments so far, it's clearly not of much interest to anybody...and anybody who's running the os will receive a notification in the next few days anyway.

Now, where's XP Service Pack 3??

Good to see Microsoft is still releasing service packs for Server 2003. However, I really want to see SP3 for XP. Building an XP box, even from SP2 media, requires over 75 patches in our environment! It takes nearly 50 minutes of cranking every time we have to build a new master disk image. Not all of us upgrade instantly.

It's nice that Microsoft makes the patches available separately. For those who don't do it, you wouldn't believe how much work it is testing patches and narrowing down which one broke an application. However, I think they should have one monster rollup available at least every few months. Most of that 50 minutes is spent dependency-resolving, isolating and backing up the files that each patch replaces. Doing that once is better than 75 times.

One thing I don't like about MS is that they tend to abandon customers who can't or won't upgrade to the next version of a product. I'd love to be on IE7, but we're stuck on 6 until several dependencies get fixed. I'm not too wild about Vista, but know that we have to go that way in the next year or so just to ensure we get the latest security fixes. Microsoft guarantees they'll backport fixes for a while, but you can bet they're doing all the active research on Vista. I can't agree with people who say they should still support NT, but most of the enterprise-class vendors have a much more lenient upgrade policy. (OpenVMS is at least kind of supported 3 versions back, IIRC.)

I came, I saw, I... WTF?????

15 hr 7 min on dial up

Crap! I run my server on dial up. Guess this is going to be a long night.

Thanks a LOT, /.

qz

x64 Bit Version

"(The 64-bit edition is still showing as a release candidate on the site.)"

FYI: It may not be showing up on the site, but it's showing up on my wife's computer via Windows Update. (The Windows XP x64 version, at least).

Large patches are needed for some companies

A number of companies have applications which are only supported by the vendor at selected patchlevels, with no other software allowed. Microsoft releasing large collection of patches as service packs makes the job of vetting various hardware and software configurations easier. Its easier for a vendor to state that their application runs on Windows 2003 SP2, rather than Windows 2003, with a large amount of patch numbers needed.

Plus, (IMHO of course), it was time for a service pack for Windows 2003 anyway.

Microsoft may have a monopoly in many areas...

...but: Releasing an operating system quietly?

Uh uh.

It so happens that Apple released Mac OS X 10.4.9 today, and the updater didn't make a single sound while it was installing it. (Though the hard disk was making all kinds of thrashy sounds, but I don't think they count.)

yep, sure saved me a lot of time.

Just installed Win2k3 on a server a couple hours ago. It was nice to see ~3 critical updates rather then the 50+ I had to install last week.

It's Apple conspiracy

You think they doubled max volume levels in 10.4.9 without purpose?

Window 2003?

Oh, you mean Windows Server 2003. I was confused. Did you mean XP? No there already
is a SP2 for that.

List of regressed hotfixes

I analyzed the script and extracted the list of possible hotfix regressions. None of them appear to be standard hotfixes. None are installed as part of a WindowsUpdate or SP1. If you have these on your system, you probably installed them after searching the KB to solve a specific problem. Many of the updates do not have public KB articles or descriptions, so you'd have to have gotten the patch after being sent the patch from MSPSS. Here are the public hotfixes that are regressed:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/898073 [microsoft.com] = [IE6 crashes on] digest proxy authentication [to https sites] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918005 [microsoft.com] = Battery power may drain more quickly [after unplugging or undocking] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/918837 [microsoft.com] = power management is turned off [after disabling WakeOnWirelessLAN] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924078 [microsoft.com] = [error opening] Properties [...] for a network printer on [WinXP] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/924301 [microsoft.com] = AutoComplete feature [broken after following javascript link in IE6] http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925020 [microsoft.com] = [Lockup when using] USB device on a multiprocessor computer http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925240 [microsoft.com] = warning message [...] new password that does not meet the requirements http://support.microsoft.com/kb/925513 [microsoft.com] = Error code Winsock [...] "WSAECONNABORTED (10053)" http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926047 [microsoft.com] = [Misplaced] AutoComplete box [...] in Internet Explorer 6 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926132 [microsoft.com] = ...WMI does not clear event registrations when the corresponding sink... http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926754 [microsoft.com] = STOP: 0x000000D1 (parameter1 , 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xf27b4e8e) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926940 [microsoft.com] = SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4 stops responding http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927291 [microsoft.com] = Dfsutil /import" command takes a long time to finish http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927493 [microsoft.com] = Winsock programs may exhaust the system's non-paged pool http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929620 [microsoft.com] = increased paging to the hard disk when you run an SAP R/3

These fixes are regressed, but they're not published on the public Knowledge Base:

"919757" "925290" "926305" "926513" "926583" "927197" "927436" "927893" "928194" "929066" "929759" "930620" "933452"

yeah, auto updates installed it yesterday...

and now I can't install software or run a executable from a network drive because of it.
2003 Server SP2 is not just a rollup of previous patches and hotfixes, it contains something extra...

Hooray!

[Un]Fortunately, when I was hit with this by surprise at work yesterday, it failed to install. Hooray Microsoft!

SBS 2003

Hopefully this will be easier than installing SP1 to SBS (small Business) 2003. When I did SP1 on SBS 2003, MS's auto update killed the system to where it couldn't accept new users, etc. I had to manually install about 3 patches and 2 more versions of SP1 to get it working right. And that was all listed as what to do in a MS knowledge base article. Totally insane way for MS to have it update.

Re:I guess, we can make an apt comparison with...

No, you cant. Not allowed.

What I find interesting is that there was an update to sp2
listed in the upgrade that I just finished to a 2003 server.

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

Very good point. Why does MS prefer big honkin' files over a more granular approach anyway?

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

Very good point. Why does MS prefer big honkin' files over a more granular approach anyway?

Microsoft doesn't prefer it: their corporate customers do, as they have to perform lengthy and expensive tests to confirm all of their mission critical apps work with the SP (imagine doing it after every patch).

Also the GP said that in Linux updates just mean the app is "updated" and there aren't any backwards incompatibilities... Hehe, I'd love to be that naive myself. Just consider however, we don't all run amateur home servers for our php blogs.

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

I don't like mindless pro-Linux droning either, but personally I prefer to deal with small updates every day, which are very unlikely to affect anything, than a traumatic experience every month which is rather likely to affect something, where you'll have no idea which of the bundled hotfixes are doing the damage.

Also you have to balance out the bonus of having the bug/security hole fixed immediately; shouldn't it be done right away to avoid worse problems?

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

More to the point, if I see an update come through on Ubuntu that is for "gnome-desktop-calendar" then I can be pretty sure that even if it is borked, it won't bork my entire system, and even if it does, I will know where to look in order to fix it.

On the flip side, if I apply W2K_SP2.exe to my server and something breaks I have a much more difficult time identifying the problem and often the best short term course of action is to roll back the entire service pack.

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

Also, testing just what could obviously break is a terrible way to test. A read a story about someone, who after upgrading to Linux kernel 2.6 started having random lockups in PHP/Apache.

Apples and Oranges. A change to the kernel potentially affects EVERYTHING on the system. Anyone doing a kernel upgrade *should* be retesting everything on the system.

The issue with MS products is their downright incestuous relationship with each other. An update to IE can potentially affect Word. A patch for a security bug in IIS can cause SQL server to go wacky. The reason that business prefers Service Packs to patches is because they've learned the hard way that if you change ANYTHING on a Windows box, you have to recertify EVERYTHING.

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

Apples and Oranges. A change to the kernel potentially affects EVERYTHING on the system. Anyone doing a kernel upgrade *should* be retesting everything on the system.

Windows doesn't have a monolithic kernel like Linux. Are you going to flame now all OS with hybrid kernels and microkernels?

You wouldn't be right anyway, since there are tons of library dependencies in Linux apps where updating a component could cause a chain reaction affecting all libs that use it, the libs that use the libs, and some app that uses the latter libs, you never suspected.

And that's +5 Informative?

How would YOU guess that your 2.4 -> 2.6 kernel upgrade would cause PHP sessions to lock up under heavy load, when you look at the list of changes?? Answer: you wouldn't.

Actually, I can think of a dozen different ways it would.

You're talking about going from one MAJOR kernel version to a different MAJOR kernel version.

You'd deploy this on the live servers and experience mysterious downtimes all the time.

Why would you deploy a MAJOR change on production servers without massive testing?

A "service pack" would be more like lib-foo_2.1.2 going to lib-foo_2.1.3.

Which is different than going to lib-foo_2.2.0.

Which is far different from going to lib-foo_3.0.0.

Which is far different from going to kernel 2.6.x from kernel 2.4.x.

Re:correct me if I'm wrong

You are correct sir.

Re:It's not funny

STFU Malda

Re:It's not funny

Aww, thanks for the encouragement Sparky! It means a lot coming from...wait...who are you?

Re:It's not funny

I continue to maintain that some psych major will have a field day studying the various pathologies that exhibit themselves on /. Parent poster is a case in point.

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

Most of the updates in SP2 have been already released as separate patches by now. If the system was kept up to date, this SP will only download/install only the few things that are missing and you don't have to go back and re-install anything.

Basically, an SP is mainly a a convenient way of getting an outdated system fully patched-up.

Re:This is one of the reasons I prefer Debian.

This also highlights one of the great advantages with open source: free redistribution. The big reasons why debian, ubuntu and other linuxes can do such seamless updates is because of the package managers; because you have one unified system of downloading and installing apps, you can update them without any hassle at all. This wouldn't be possible on windows since the overwhelming majority of apps are not open source, meaning that you can't have a unified repository where you can download them from. That would be copyright infringement. This makes it so that every single app that wants to stay current has to make their own versions of an automatic updater, often making it gruesomely annoying to start whatever you need because of some damn pop-up (Acrobat Reader, I'm looking at you!). In ubuntu,, when something needs updating, a little star shines at the top of my screen, I click on it and enter my password, and bobs-yer-uncle, it's done.

Package managers are such an ingenious solution to handling software, and it is something that could only have come from the open source world.

Well done, linux people! Well done!

Re:It's not funny

Who the fuck are you people who just come on here and completely unreasonably go apeshit at people? It's just not cool.

Re:How funny.

I just submitted this, and it got rejected and then this shows up on the front page. Interesting!

The post says "Several readers noted..." - does this mean you were one of those several? How does it work if, say, ten people submit the same story in the space of half an hour?