Stop ranting about the blaster worm

Sorry to say it, but I find the recent rants about the MS Blaster worm from system admins a little silly. MS issued a patch on July 16th. That's how many days ago? Right. Now, when are the systems vulnerable? When port 135 is open to the outside, that's right. Now, how many days do you need to test every scenario? A week? At most. That's July 23rd, and you can start patching. That's how many days ago? Oh, you need to patch 1000 systems? Perhaps you should enroll some software MS developed ages ago to push installs onto client machines.

I know patching can be a pain, I know software like SMS can be a pain too (hey, I did the MCSE track in the early days of NT4.0), but that can't be an excuse of any network failures due to the blasterworm. If you as a sysadmin did your job well, nothing would have happened. True, if software engineers did their jobs also that well, you wouldn't have to worry one second... but you also would be out of a job, because who needs a sysadmin with perfect software?

Ok back to typing user documentation, my favorite way of spending time :)

5 Comments

  • Well, +1 for you here, Frans.



    I received a lot of e-mails the last few days from different Microsoft channels, providing some very useful information on the whole Blaster thing. And yes, it made me wonder why, in spite of the early availability of patches, the worm could do so much damage over the last few days.



    So, I totally agree with this entry from you.



    Admittedly, I always placed you more or less in the anti-Microsoft camp. I guess, that's because some of your first postings in the DOTNET-CLR discussion group of DevelopMentor, which were actually the first words I ever read from you. Back then, if I remember correctly, you'd just started developing for the .NET platform. Those first postings were quite critical and, I still think, far too agressive in their lack of nuances. So, now I'm kind of ashamed for hanging on to that first impression---and I apologize: you seem quite objective to me now.



    And when MS screws up, I count on some serious ranting from you towards Redmond: just to illustrate your objectivity. ;)

  • I started developing with .NET in march 2002 :P But I agree, sometimes ranting can be counterproductive when you want to make impressions, however even rants do get heard. I'm not in the anti-microsoft camp, however due to .NET I left the pro-microsoft camp which was a thing I never thought possible :)



    It will be all right, when whidbey will be released.



    I also think MS should have done more to protect users. I mean: WHY isn't there a free add-on for windows 2000 which simply acts as a firewall like in XP? They have the code already there, it's in XP, why do I have to buy an expensive firewall for windows 2000? Just to block some ports. That's the kind of thinking that's still not there in Redmond. It will be there, but not at the moment or at least too less :) Ah well.. nothing's perfect :)

  • <i>"If you as a sysadmin did your job well"</i><br><br>If MS did their job well, this would not have even been an issue in the first place. Do it right the first time, or not at all.

  • "who needs a sysadmin with perfect software"



    I'm sure a lot of sysadmins would resent that.



    Without MS making the stupid and dangerous decision to have things like RPC enabled by default, sysadmins could concentrate on more important things like, well, administering the system.

  • >If MS did their job well, this would not have even been an issue in the first place.

    >Do it right the first time, or not at all.



    If you could start by copy-pasting other people's quotes correctly...

    And Frans is talking about those coders, haven't you just read these next few lines as well or are just just plain st*@(*d?

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