IP: Last in series.A CASE IN POINT -- Dangers of U.S. Cyber Chief to Map Infra structure for Security and forces patches down our throats (see last para)

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Point made. The idea suggested by the WH is a nightmare in the making. djf


> From: "Hungerford, Brian" <bhungerf@umich.edu>
>
>
> The most recent security patch blew one of our servers out of the water on
> Thanksgiving Eve (fortunately, we were able to rebuild in less than 3
> hours).  The patch worked on over a dozen other machines prior to that one;
> I suspect that the failure was due to an interaction with one of the two
> network card drivers (Compaq Netelligent), so maybe it was unique to that
> machine or model; maybe not.  Maybe the driver wasn't up to date, or some
> other patch from a different vendor should have been applied first.  Who
> knows?
>
> When security patches are being shoved out the door under pressure, and
> there are literally millions of possible hardware configurations out there,
> things like this are going to happen.  No matter how careful a vendor might
> be, you simply can't anticipate or test all the possibilities (cf., Michael
> Crichton's "Jurassic Park").
>
> >Brian David Hungerford (MCSE)
> >Workstation & Network Administrator II
> >MAIS Workstation & Network Support
> >The University of Michigan

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