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Scotty, I need more power!  🙂

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BobbyB, Elly, Noel Carboni, AlanH

We blocked and rolled back the bad update KB3178690 on our WSUS servers a few days ago.  Any workstations that had picked that up successfully removed it by Wednesday.  Last night we allowed the replacement KB3191855 across the board.  It succeeded (and in most cases a reboot was NOT required on Windows 7 or 10.)

So “supercede” status or not, the old one is not a pre-req for the new version of this Excel 2010 patch.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

I’ve been really surprised that none of the articles I’ve seen this week on the issue has identified the real reasons that big money got behind this new law:

It’s not just about selective advertising (although that’s certainly one benefit to the ISP’s).

It’s about digital red lining.  It’s about selling your personal data to banks: loan originators, financial data brokers; it will become part of your risk profile. No, not the one you personally can see when you pull your “credit report” from the big three.  The other one, we called it a One Sheet when I was in the business.  You can’t pull that for yourself.  And your bank is forbidden by contract from sharing it directly with you in full when you apply for a mortgage.  You would be amazed and dismayed by what’s on that report.

It’s also about surveillance . . . but if I talk about that I’ll be accused of wearing a tin foil hat.

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Elly

dave1977nj wrote:

March, 2017 Preview of Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB4012218) This update killed my updates for Windows 7. I have a Kaby Lake Processor and now I can not get anymore windows updates. Please see my screenshots attached. Is there any work around for this? Thank you

Would you be willing to post a screen of your recent updates list?  I need at least this most recent batch that your system installed, and the last month or two also if possible.

~ Group "Weekend" ~

My son is on spring break this week.  He finished his morning chores and wanted to play on his XBox today . . .   and it’s refusing to log his account in.  Once we forced the console offline, it allowed him into his local saved account.  Odd that it did not revert to allow that like the PC would/does.

My customers are reporting very mixed results.  Some of them on Office 365 Business are having issues logging into the web facing versions of their stuff:  Word online, Onedrive, Outlook etc.  But it’s not consistent at all.

My customers on Office 365 E plans seem to be doing fine . . .

EDIT:

More info for those interested.

First:  all our family accounts just started working again in the last few minutes.

Admin login to Office 365 for Business and Outlook accounts on portal.office.com show massive red X status outages for OneDrive, Outlook.

Admin login to the same for Enterprise plans show NO outages, and they seem to be working fine.  OneDrive for business is good, email is good, etc. Green check marks down the entire row (except for low level problems with Team – ongoing since March 15.)

I learned something today that I had suspected before.  The E plans are on a different server farm entirely – including (apparently) authentication.

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My grandfather came over by slow boat, hated New York and moved west to stake a claim.

In my slow cooker today is a corned beef roast.  Cabbage going in 30 minutes before dinner.  Soda bread is rising on the counter.  No green beer though.  🙂

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I guess this is a reply in the negative:  we have several Kaby Lake workstations on Win 7 Pro and all of them took the patches released this week (March 2017) just fine.

But . . .  they are all behind a WSUS server too. I do not know at this time if that makes any difference at all.

On the off chance it might:  I would be looking hard at some of the recent optional patches to see if any of them might trigger this block.  We generally don’t sync those on our WSUS management servers.

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woody

I am on the fence about this.  As a sometimes systems builder – I have come to abhor third party chipset add-ons for features that Intel or AMD have not yet directly added to their chipsets (think advanced USB, other interfaces, heck for a short time even SATA was on this list.)

I have also seen cases where newer processors could not perform at their max capabilities on older operating system driver levels.  Many times over the past 25 years.

So in that regard – for optimum stability and performance I really like when current gen hardware and software/drivers come together.  And yes, Windows 10 is growing on me (mostly from a security viewpoint) but then  I also like the very latest advances on Linux and Android.

But again:  given that there is almost no substantial difference between the newest Intel CPU and the next previous versions (no new instruction sets that I know about – if I am wrong please let me know) it feels like this is a somewhat arbitrary line in the sand.  And in light of the overly aggressive stance MS has shown during the GWX days it feels sour.

I will say that I feel the case could be different for AMD’s newest offering.  There are in my opinion some pretty substantial differences between Ryzen and older versions.  But then – AMD has stated they would provide driver support for Windows 7 and 8? Or did they?  There seems to be some fuzziness there too.

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woody

The script function modifier “allusers” for “Get-AppxPackage” was broken in or around (I think) the November 2016 patch for build 1607.  We used to use it all the time, and now we have to run a similar script on first time login for each user on a new machine.

Also remember to disable the feature “Settings >> Personalization >> Start >> Occasionally show suggestions in Start” (formerly turn off microsoft consumer experience) . . .

 

~ Group "Weekend" ~

45Mbps on Wi-Fi is actually not terrible.  If I can achieve that in a crowded (shared) office building with many competing Wi-Fi gateways on all available channels, I’m pretty darn happy.  In a neighborhood with competing home Wi-Fi units surrounding you that’s not shabby either.  You might be able to get a bit higher, at close range, with a top notch Wi-Fi gateway and a 3×3 adapter on your laptop.  Might being the operative qualifier here.

See: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/802-eleventy-what-a-deep-dive-into-why-wi-fi-kind-of-sucks/

Quote:

“If what you’re getting out of this so far is “the AC speed rating is always a lie,” you’re not wrong. So let’s get back to what we can actually, hopefully, kinda, expect out of all this.”

“You’re thirty feet away with two or more walls between you and the router before you realize it, and now you’re looking at more like 80 Mbps… and that’s assuming you’ve got a great wireless client device, a really good access point, and you don’t have any other people or devices competing with you for that radio’s attention.“

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ch100

Also:  GPO settings don’t always take effect until a true reboot . . . (not a fast boot enabled shutdown/restart.)

 

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b wrote:

. . . But if that’s one troublesome update out of billions served, I’ll take my chances. (GWX wasn’t applicable to Windows 10 PCs.)

I completely agree.  Far easier to fix a machine broken by a patch gone wrong, than to fix the network when malware gets into everything from one vulnerable entry point.

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ch100

b wrote:

What would that achieve that the current QUOTE button cannot?

When used independently:

The Reply button places your new post – positioned directly under and indented – relative to the message being replied to . . .

The Quote button (if used first and by itself) creates a new message with the quote at the very bottom of the stack – it does not look like a reply because on a long discussion thread it appears in the wrong location.

There is a nice workaround though:

If you want your reply to appear under the message to which you are answering, and you want to quote that message (or a portion of it) then hit Reply first, wait for the page refresh, then scroll up and also hit Quote beside the message you want to copy.  It will insert the entire message in correct quoted and linked brackets for you.  You can also copy and paste segments, and enclose them yourself as a raw quote, but unless you are advanced enough to place the message referral link it will not be clickable.

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Microfix, HiFlyer, owburp, satrow

ch100 wrote:

You probably like almost everyone else do not synchronize Feature on Demand on WSUS, which is the typical setup.

Confirmed, we don’t use FoD at all.

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Not seeing this on any of our clients.  But I also have all of them set to only sync US-EN patches.  (And we sync only on Saturday evenings . . . so I might be fooling myself and could see issues Sunday morning.)

And yes, the list on that blog seems to indicate localized patches are flooding WSUS servers that are not constrained properly.

 

*currently our company is managing 9 WSUS servers, mixed versions from 3.2 to 4.0 . . .

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