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I can think of no greater security hole than allowing an operating system to be altered without direct user control.

Ummmm, have you looked at this program at all? The most aggressive setting allows it to automatically go to a pre-determined site, and download the critical update. It will then petition you to allow the install, but will also allow you to view the critical update. If nothing else, it serves notice that there are critical updates that need to be installed.

I have never met an IT manager who permits this practice.

Which would you rather have, a company that shuts down everytime a high school punk decides to hot-rod an existing virus (any idea how many thousands of virus's are out there), or a OS that automatically updates itself so it is protected against this. Norton SystemWorks, Symantec Anti-virus (same company) and MacAfee all automatically update. I think you need to expand your pool of IT managers you get your info from.

Good point. I don't have a helper so I have to go around and update 22 machines everytime a new flaw/patch is output. Automatic update would really help me, though I'd still have to go machine-to-machine to check. I suppose I really have reached the point where I need to get some system management software to manage the pushing of updates to the clients. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery?

The most aggressive setting allows it to automatically go to a pre-determined site, and download the critical update. It will then petition you to allow the install, but will also allow you to view the critical update. If nothing else, it serves notice that there are critical updates that need to be installed.

That is all well and good until someone compromises your system connection or an in-route router. On-line operating system updates are inherently dangerous, and setting them up to automatically propose them is foolish.

Which would you rather have, a company that shuts down everytime a high school punk decides to hot-rod an existing virus (any idea how many thousands of virus's are out there), or a OS that automatically updates itself so it is protected against this. Norton SystemWorks, Symantec Anti-virus (same company) and MacAfee all automatically update. I think you need to expand your pool of IT managers you get your info from.

That is a false choice. I would prefer to have an operating system that didn't have all of these flaws and holes and didn't need to be updated every week. The very idea of giving the company that created all these security holes an even wider security hole is lunacy.

I think you need to expand your pool of IT managers you get your info from.

Lots of IT managers have been burned by updates. Getting hit by sophisticated worms is a rather new phenomenon. Computer Associates makes a virus scanner that allows updates to be installed to a test network and approved before being distributed to all workstations. It was this particular paranoia that allowed Melissa into one of my former companies. CA was so intent on avoiding problems with IT departments that they didn't get the Melissa fix distributed until it was too late.

THe problem is if you update a server you can break a whole application cluster without proper testing. One of our admins updated a w2k sql server and broke the darn database. I would rather have an outage of a day than have to recover tape from IM and rebuild the whole system from the last build (and thuhs incure serious data loss)

Which would you rather have, a company that shuts down everytime a high school punk decides to hot-rod an existing virus (any idea how many thousands of virus's are out there), or a OS that automatically updates itself so it is protected against this. Norton SystemWorks, Symantec Anti-virus (same company) and MacAfee all automatically update. I think you need to expand your pool of IT managers you get your info from.

My experience with microsoft updates is they don't always leave your system in a working state. I had to back out one update a month or two ago that left me unable to connect to the internet