RE: MS Software Update Service

I've been playing with SUS for a while, but not using it in production. There was a discussion on the topic recently on another list where various solutions including SUS, SMS, and third-party tools were discussed. Overall there seemed to be no ideal tool and different environments were better suited to different tools.

There are some definite pros and cons for SUS. The most notable pro, of course, is the price. It is a free (outside of Windows Server licenses) solution for allowing clients to grab critical updates from a local, approved list.

There are several cons:

-Limited scope of patches (critical updates to IE and OS only)
-Scheduled pull topology (can't push out an urgent patch)
-Poor logging (minimal server-side logging and some client-side logging)

Overall it's something to consider, but not nearly the same as the third-party solutions you mentioned. Those allow for a much broader range of patches to be applied and are generally push based. Personally I found Hfnetchk Pro to be the most appealing of the tools I tried, but the minimum license size of 50 systems was not appealing to someone who maintains only a handful of infrastructure servers.

For our distributed environment the current version of SMS is not manageable due to its need for domain admin level access. I am hopeful that the next version will have more potential for environments like mine.

Brad Judy

Information Technology Services
University of Colorado at Boulder

> -----Original Message-----
Received on Thu Feb 20 18:29:15 2003

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