Microsoft To Distribute Third-Party Patches

dhiren writes "Secunia on Wednesday announced that their authenticated internal vulnerability scanner, the Corporate Software Inspector (CSI) 4.0, has been integrated with Microsoft Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM). This will hopefully pave the way for other vendors to also make use of Windows' existing patching infrastructure and eliminate the need for the multitude of custom updater applications and services that clutter most systems today."

Re:Oh just call it

[Anonymous Coward]

You really can't call it a package manager because it doesn't do dependency and it doesn't do upgrades. It just does patches - which is why it is not called a package manager.

Re:Misleading article

[Anonymous Coward]

What WSUS are you using? And what the hell are you replacing it with for patch management across a few hundred windows PCs? It takes me only a matter of a half hour a week to handle and check up on patches and updates.

WSUS is a free application for deploying and controlling patches that would normally be handled via automatic updates. Automatic updates still downloads and installs but it pulls from WSUS instead of directly from MS. You can deny patches when there are issues or conflicts and you can see where problems are. You must be thinking of something entirely different or you don't know what the hell you are doing.

CNet TechTracker

[Animaether]

reply to self - go figure.. I tried to dig up some more information on the old service.. and somewhere buried among the google hits:
http://www.cnet.com/techtracker/ [cnet.com]

Which sounds like it does what the old app did... except you now need a CNet account to see the results? *sigh*
Some posts in the forum for it ( http://forums.cnet.com/techtracker-forum/ [cnet.com] ) seem to indicate some possible issues as well.

Re:CNet used to have a similar service

[matang]

filehippo has an update checker. i've used it for a while and it works well: http://www.filehippo.com/updatechecker/ [filehippo.com]

Re:Wait, what's going on?

[Jazz-Masta]

WSUS is what server admins use to push patches to machines connected to a particular server.

Most machines that are part of a domain or network that utilizes WSUS has Windows Update disabled. The server admin goes through the patches and selects the ones he/she wants to push out to each of the computers.

It's quick and simple...but has nothing to do with the end user.

Re:OSS Alternative

[bdam]

You are mostly correct. In my project, there's no support for automatically importing or being alerted about new updates from vendors. I'm not aware of any centralized source for that sort of data. If such a thing exists, I'd be interested to know about it. So, to be clear, Secunia has a definite edge there that I can't conceive of matching without some freely available repository. However there is some value for the software publisher. One of the reasons that Microsoft released the API was in the hope that publishers would create and release catalogs for their programs although few have done so. These catalogs would make it dead simple for the administrator to manage that publisher's application in their environment. My project currently doesn't support those catalogs, mainly because so few exist, but it's on the proverbial to-do list.

Re:Compare?

[radish]

Broadly speaking they're very similar. With Windows Update it's normally limited to stuff which MS publish, in much the same way as (say) apt-get on Ubuntu is limited to things in the Ubuntu repos by default. Obviously that's a lot more software there as it's freely distributable, but you still get packages sometimes which aren't included in the distro's repos and you have to add another source to your packages list (or even worse, download a tarball and maintain it manually). This change is to allow third party code to come down through Windows Update, in essence adding more package sources.

It's not new or unique, but it is still useful and a step forward for Windows. Now OSX is the only one without something similar (as far as I know).

Re:Oh just call it

[rjch]

You really can't call it a package manager because it doesn't do dependency and it doesn't do upgrades. It just does patches - which is why it is not called a package manager.

Actually, WSUS does do dependences, even if it does them badly. I do agree that calling it a package manager is an overstatement though.

Re:About time!

[clysel]

dpkg is ported for windows ... take a look at http://windows-get.sourceforge.net/index.php [sourceforge.net]

Re:About time!

[Runaway1956]

Every app is available for download. If the user is savvy enough to understand the differences between versions, then he will be savvy enough to use Google to ask for help installing that particular version.

Attractive and fully functional GUI? Yeah, I guess so. Depending on what you mean by "attractive", and "fully functional". If, by "attractive" you mean, "it looks and works like Microsoft", then you're out of luck. If by "attractive" you mean "it has working buttons to open and close, with a title bar, a toolbar with a help button", yeah, it's all there. If by "attractive" you mean "can it get me off" - well, only you can be the judge of that. As for functionality - the GUI's are just front ends for the REAL package managers, and they are all fully functional.

Have you had a particular problem, or are you echoing some of the FUD that the Windows fanbois have posted?