In October of 2003 I was working in a small Law Firm as their IT support. One of the things I had to do was update many, many computers and using Windows Update was taking forever! I came up with a batch “auto-patcher” to help speed things up, and since I was a member of Neowin, I thought I’d share. Add in the VB coding talents of Antonis Kaladis, and the AutoPatcher was born. I worked day and night with releases for 2 years before I needed a break. Antonis got a bunch more helpers to help with releases and AutoPatcher thrived. Cut to yesterday…
Microsoft Ceases AutoPatcher Project
I had a call from Microsoft Legal this morning and they have told me that we are no longer allowed to endorse AutoPatcher on Neowin.
Microsoft will only allow updates to be downloaded from its own servers.
Read more here: Goodbye AP!
I can’t figure out why Microsoft would wait 4 years to shut down the project… if they didn’t like it, they could have said so 3.5 years ago (and yes, they were aware of it). Oh well… who am I to question the all-knowing powers that be over in Redmond? 
Anyway, I just wanted to share my thoughts on the subject. Feel free to comment, either here, on Neowin, or on AutoPatcher.com.
R.I.P. AutoPatcher
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Under :
Political & Other Real World Issues, Science, Health & Technology, World Wide Interwebnet Tubes
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Tags: autopatcher, Microsoft, neowin, servers, talents, Updates, vb coding, windows, windows update
I was recently accepted to the Windows Home Server beta test, and just got it all installed yesterday. First, let me explain the system I created. I didn’t want to go out and buy anything so I went through my spare parts (junk piles) to see what I could find that would meet the system requirements. The system I’m running consists of:
Generic Socket-A Motherboard
AMD Athlon 1200 CPU
512 MB PC-133 RAM
32MB AGP nVidia Video Card
10/100 LAN Card
PCI IDE Card
PCI USB 2.0 Card
PCI SATA Card
40 GB PATA Drive - System
40 GB PATA Drive - Data
30 GB PATA Drive - Data
80 GB SATA Drive - Data
120 GB SATA Drive - Data
250 GB USB Drive - Data
Not too bad, huh? So far I’ve copied all my saved data over to the now 500+ GB of storage I have, and tonight I plan to start sorting it into the folders that were created (Music, Pictures, etc). Once that’s done I’ll setup a couple of my systems to backup to the “server” and also enable the data protection to see how that affects the performance. One thing that surprised me is that I have a variety of different drives, all plugged into different controllers, and not only did the system recognize it all, it merges it all into one “pool” of storage space. I kind of hope to see this technology used more in upcoming home user versions of Operating Systems, as I can’t count the number of people I know who have a second Hard Drive and don’t know that they could just save files over to it.
Amazingly for what it is, Windows Home Server works great. It doesn’t have that many options, but it would be excellent for someone like my father, who for now is forced to manually backup to a removable hard drive. It would be nice for him to have a server in the corner of his den that would just sit and hold his data.
It’s been a few days since my last post… seems our conversion to a new domain (name and servers) for my company took a bit longer than I realized! I worked about 36 hours starting from when I got off on Friday @ 5:00 PM and when I came back at Monday @ 8:00 AM.
I’d say the conversion is a good 90% done… we had a total of around 160 users scattered over 5+ states and had never attempted something like this before. We just have some minor fires to put out and little details to finish and we’re done. Not bad for a team of 4 people (2 contractors and 2 corporate staff). 
Anyway, that’s my update for the day… I’m just glad I got to get off work at a normal time today!!
I’m finally back on track for my MCSA! Whoo! Only two tests stand before me and the certfication, and the first to get beaten to a pulp by my brain is the 70-290: Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Environment. Piece of cake, right? 
Anywho, I’m hoping to get this one under my belt before the middle of March, so wish me luck on it! I’m thinking it won’t be too horrible, as this is something I do for a living, but you never know!
For the second day in a row now our new server room here at work has reached over 90 degrees by the time I’ve come in (it is also the second day in a row that I’ve been called before 7:00 AM). From what we can figure, the air conditioning unit is thinking that the outside temperature (around 10 degrees) is the inside temp, and instead of cooling, is heating. Why does it even know that it is cold outside? Well it looks like someone punctured the roof when working on it and that is causing the cold air to seep down to the air unit… nice.
Yesterday it got so hot that one of our phone cards started to malfunction and caused about 20 people here to go without their phones till we cooled it off (canned air works wonders in a pinch). We called someone out, he puttered around for an hour or so, and called it fixed. Great. Well last night it actually got so bad that one of our servers actually failed and shut itself down… luckily we were able to get it to come up, but it never should have gotten anywhere close to that point in the first place. The only way we’re getting it to cool down now is actually having a giant fan blowing the hot air out of the room, which we have wide open… it looks ridiculous, but at least it’s working. We have a call in for people to not only fix the roof, but hopefully to disable the heating unit, period. I don’t care if it’s 40 degrees in there, I’ll wear a coat.
I swear, it better be an icebox in there tomorrow morning or heads will roll…
