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Saturday 2 May 2009, 3:19 AM
Vista, a Denial of Access Attack?
I sent an email to the IT director warning him about the bandwidth hit the office network was going to get. We have probably 100 desktops all running MS Office 2007 on them. After joking about my email to him about it, a few minutes later, the IT guy gets on his system. Same sort of scenario, but he gets 385 MB in updates listed and his update is Vista SP2. So I laugh right back at him. Visaster on my desktop is running SP1 so I expect to get the next Windows update dump on Monday.
The total download pending and otherwise is practically 900 MB, enough for a partial DVD image. Assuming that Microsoft shoved that entire update through the pipe to my desktop, the hundred other desktops in our office. The thousands, maybe the hundreds of thousands just in Houston alone. The millions of desktops in the US.
Then I think: “Imagine being at the end of a dial-up connection and having all that to download!” No way! Even a standard speed DSL connection would be maxed-out for quite a while.
Microsoft expects a lot of its customers.
Assume for a few seconds that you have an ISP account on high-speed DSL or cable that bills by the gigabyte-per-month or that you have an account that limits the amount of downloaded traffic. Downloading updates from Microsoft starts getting expensive. I wonder if anybody has done an analysis of the networking load on the entire Internet solely caused by Microsoft updates, especially on Patch Tuesdays? What do you call an Internet-wide Denial of Access? A IDOA?
If you're a Windows customer with what now seems like a fairly slow or restrictive ISP connection, are you going to WANT to download Windows Updates and either max out your download limit or your connection time?
PreviousComments on this post
It would only be fair to have an MS update exeption to the MS update bandwidth usage. Or send MS an invoice for the trouble ha ha.
It's presumably even worse after a clean install and all the updates, back to the year dot (for WinXP anyway) have to be downloaded and installed with a multitude of restarts. That's for Microsoft software. Then the game continues for all the other software and security.
Not only bandwidth hogging but also very time consuming and frustrating. Virtually impossible without a broadband connection.
Makes a good case for adopting Linux, generally far less time consuming, trouble and bandwidth use.
In relation to a post by Roger on another subject, I deal with people who don't know the difference between Windows and (M$) Office and really do not have a clue about security online.
The last time I cleaned off a drive and re-installed XP Pro, SP3 was already slip-streamed into the image so that wasn't too hard. But there were still 106 updates that needed to be downloaded and installed on the box! Even with a D3 connection to the Internet (at work) it took me another hour to bring the box up to date.
I would suspect that is going to be one thing among many that Microsoft will use to push people to use Visaster or Windows 7. If you've had to rebuild a XP Pro system more than a couple times, you might want to find something a little less likely to be successfully attacked. Most people will think of Win7 but the real answer is to get off the Windows wagon and go Linux, OSX or BSD, anything but Windows!
