David M. Stein's Blog

A UAC add-on from Norton? Huh?

David M. Stein — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:56:00 GMT

I caught this on the FileForum site on BetaNews: It's a Vista UAC Utility from Norton. Looks pretty interesting and I'm going to give it a spin. Judging from what I've read on the Windows 7 (Engineering Windows) blog, it sounds like the W7 team is already looking in that direction. As I've ranted about elsewhere: UAC is a good thing and needs to be left enabled no matter how bad users feel. It's the speed bump in front of the children's playground. The mosquito net in the African tent. The insulator for your beer can. The deadbolt lock on your front door. Oh well, you know what I mean.

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Course 7197A - Managing Enterprise Desktops with MDOP

David M. Stein — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:35:00 GMT

The App-V blog folks posted information about a new training course being offered by Microsoft covering MDOP and enterprise desktop management. This is a 5-day instructor led course. I'm assuming that it is at least based upon (if not directly adapted from) the same course I attended out at building 29 on the Redmond campus back in December 2007. That was indeed a useful course, but it didn't really dive deep enough into the advanced aspects of the core items within MDOP (those would be AGPM, DEM, DaRT, AIS, and of course SoftGrid or now-called "App-V"). This did a great job of getting you familiar enough with it to do some serious damage, but you have to go back to your labs and work out the real meat of these products. They are all really interesting products (well, except for AIS - in my humble opinion, but hey). There's also a link to the course outline and information about where you can attend one of these sessions.

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Group Policy Preferences Migration Tool in the Works

David M. Stein — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:30:00 GMT

Michael Kleef over at the Group Policy Team blog posted word that they are near completion on a new utility for migrating PolicyMaker Preferences into WS08 Group Policy Preferences. This will obviously benefit those that were using the product suite prior to the Microsoft acquisition. Nice to see they're focused on things like that. So, for anyone out there who was (or is) using PolicyMaker and is looking to go towards WS08 anytime soon, this should be a little boost to your morale.

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All About (the various) Microsoft Update Services

David M. Stein — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 11:39:00 GMT

From the PC Mag Security Watch blog site...

Microsoft has released a paper entitled "Windows Update Explained". It talks about what Windows Update is and how it works.

There are no big surprises here for those already fairly familiar with the various Microsoft updating technologies, but it's good to have one simply-written description of what their various updating technologies are and what the important points are of how they work. For instance, it talks about what the important default settings are, there's a brief description of WSUS (Windows Software Update Services) is and why you might want it, what the difference is between Windows Update and Microsoft Update, and some things you might expect to see in Windows Update over time, such as updates to the updating software itself.

The paper is only 10 pages long. If you're unclear on some of these issues it's worth the quick read.

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VMWare Workstation 6.5 / VMWare Server 2.0 Go RTM!

David M. Stein — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 02:55:00 GMT

For anyone not already aware, VMware released Workstation 6.5 and Server 2.0 for public download on Sept 23. I'm a HUGE fan of both products (as well as VMWare Converter and of course: ESX). Download Workstation here: http://www.vmware.com/download/ws/ Download VMware Server 2.0 here: http://www.vmware.com/download/server/

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Hiatus 2008

David M. Stein — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:05:00 GMT

Not a software package, but a state of "being", for me actually. I apologize for the dearth of postings, here and on my personal blog, but I've been logistically squashed lately. I leave the house at 5:30 AM to get a parking spot and time it to leave early to beat the evening rush across the tunnel. 64 miles round trip commute each day. Not the worst I've seen, but the route isn't the smoothest either. The morning drive is usually 30-40 minutes, while many evenings take 1 to 2 hours to get home.

By the time I get home, tend to the family and house stuff and run errands (drop off, pick up kids), get my stuff ready for the next day, it's 11pm and I go to bed and repeat the process. The weekends are equally consumed, or when not, I tend to crash on the couch and attempt to catch up on sleep.

That said, I haven't had time to poke at technology with a stick and write about how it squeaks in response. Nor have I had time to record more Level 5 guides. I have heard some would like more guides posted, but I'm not seeing any specific requests for topics. I don't have the time to do large scale guides like migrating from Win2K to WS08 or doing Exchange/AD migrations (which I don't even cover). I would rather focus on WS08 specific features - the product itself, and what it brings to the table. The same goes for WSUS, but I think I've about run through everything there is on WSUS unless someone like you can suggest something to add.

I welcome any such suggestions, so please post a comment below and let me know if you have some ideas that would benefit you and others who visit this site? Meanwhile, I've got to get some laundry done and pack my lunch for tomorrow. Cheers!

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Where is the Best Place to Live and Work in IT?

David M. Stein — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 20:33:00 GMT

Before you assume I'm going to pose yet another knee-jerk discussion prompt about salaries and job openings, hold on. And although you can accuse me of being a nationalist pig, this question is aimed at living within the continental United States (otherwise referred to by military folk as CONUS). I'm really not a nationalist pig, but this is a great place to live.

Let's formulate this like a certification exam question, just for giggles ...

John, his wife, and his family of four children live in a medium-sized town of Podunk (pick any state actually), where he works as a Systems Engineer in a Windows 2003 environment for a SMB company. John's role is very narrowly defined. John hungers for challenge and working with technology that is newer than 5-10 years old. Things like virtualization, web enabled services, and the latest software. He would also like to enjoy a flexible schedule, and a more loosely defined role that would enable him to explore various technologies and solutions.

The average IT related pay scales in the Podunk region are below the national average. There are fewer IT jobs to be found in Podunk than in most other areas also. John's four children, ages 6 to 16, are all in school and enjoy sports and outdoor activities. John is wondering if relocating to another area (within the U.S.) might be a good idea. Some place where there are plenty of available (stable) IT jobs, good pay and benefits, and a reasonably low cost of living. More importantly, it needs to be a place where his family would enjoy a wide range of "things to do" outdoors and shopping, etc. What should John do?

(A) Relocate to anywhere in the State of _______

(B) Relocate to the city or metropolitan region of ________

(C) John should stay put in Podunk, things suck everywhere

(D) John should consider a career change

Post your comments of what you think is the best answer? Unfortunately, I can't issue you a certificate.

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Microsoft Announces "New" Hyper-V Server 2008, Dave Yawns

David M. Stein — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 22:14:00 GMT

Microsoft held a big shindig today to announce new goodies for the "Get Virtualized" marketing campaign. Among the notable items was the announcement that Hyper-V Server 2008, a new bare metal hypervisor product (sans Windows Server 2008) will be made available to the general public for free within the next 30 days. Pretty amazing actually. I'm sure Paul Maritz and the VMware gang are feeling some heat, even if only a little. ESXi being free is nice, but what will VMware do to counter this? It's going to be interesting to see what shakes out over the next few months going into the holiday season. Hmm, maybe Virtual Center will go completely free? Maybe ThinApp? OMG that would rock.

I still get some comments that my complaints about App-V products being unreachable by those lower than "enterprise" customers. I won't back down. I can't point to one single "small-medium" business that has Software Assurance and MDOP on every desktop, nor any that can justify it in their budgets.

So, why the "Yawns" comment? Because I'm not impressed. Everyone saw this coming from a hundred miles away and giving stuff away free is nice and all, but it's hardly "innovation" by any stretch of the imagination. Now we're likely to see others step up and try to top that, or maybe they'll wait and see if VMware and Microsoft eat each other's revenue to nothing and then save themselves the boardroom embarrassment of failed market spending. Why compete if the biggest players kill each other off anyway? It's hard to see how this dust will settle, but unless I see three things come out of it, I'm not going to be impressed:

1. Either App-V or ThinApp become "free" products

2. ESXi or Hyper-V Server work on 32-bit hardware (not sure about Hyper-V Server yet)

3. SCVMM or VC become "free" products as well.

Would "Free" be impressive? To me? Not really. But it would be extremely helpful and handy. I can think of several places where I could suggest using those goodies where they are simply unattainable at present. Oh well, I'm blowing smoke again. Sorry. pffffffffffftttt.

[Edit: Never post to Community Server using Google Chrome. Bad formatting results, had to repost in FF3]

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What's Holding Back Application Virtualization?

David M. Stein — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 02:14:00 GMT

I posted a rather knee-jerk thought on my personal blog about this, but I wanted to expound a bit here since the audience is a bit more serious (*a-hem*).

It seems that everyone is buying up virtualization products and services like plywood at a hurricane sale. Microsoft snatched up Softricity and Kidaro. EMC/VMware grabbed Thinstall. Citrix nabbed Xen. Sun acquired Virtual Box. Oracle and RedHat jumped in, and well, it's a big bowl of virtual soup now. At this point, I would venture to say that if you own a company making virtualization products or services, and you haven't been acquired (or even courted) by a buyer, you need to wonder why.

So much virtualization is going on, yet all of it seems focused mostly on the "hypervisor" side of things. The base-level substrate approach to hosting multiple guest operating systems. Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware ESX, Citrix Xen Server and so on. There are more every week it seems.

Application virtualization however, or "App-V" (which Microsoft seems to be making into its own trademark), is a much more refined focus on encapsulating just an application (or application suite in some cases) for all sorts of benefits. It's not really that new, so that's why I'm confused about why the big players in this market seem to be holding back on things.

The biggest obstacle comes down to cost. The pricing models are still too high. They're aimed exclusively at large enterprise customers. SMB's could absolutely benefit from this technology, but they don't even know about it because most of them don't (a) have Microsoft Software Assurance on all their desktops, or (b) don't hear anything out of VMware besides "ESX" and "Virtual Center". Only die-hard techies know about the other players like Altiris SVS, Sun, Oracle and Citrix (who also aims their marketing at enterprise customers).

Don't believe me? Go visit some law firms, doctor's offices, schools, and even municipal government IT staff people. Ask them what their thoughts are about ThinApp, or App-V (ok, SoftGrid), or SVS or XenApp. If you get even one of them who responds with complete understanding you're really lucky. Some will have heard about these products, but will not be really familiar with what they're about. Some won't even know the names.

I've seen many environments where the biggest desktop support pains involve application conflicts, local user rights (with regards to using certain legacy applications), installing upgrades, rolling back problematic updates and so on. Trying to tackle these issues with "traditional" solutions is a major pain. A MAJOR PAIN. I know. I work with software packaging and deployment all day. I would gladly trade Wise or InstallShield script debugging for SoftGrid (oops App-V) or ThinApp "sequencing" ANY DAY of the week. No comparison. And the results are equally as good: conflicts, user rights, upgrades, roll-backs, all are massively reduced when addressed properly by App-V solutions.

I've spent the better part of two weeks packaging ten separately CAD applications into a single package to deploy to 2000 users on a WAN using Wise Package Studio and Altiris. Painful. Writing so much scripting code and hassling with pre-requisite items like .NET, MSXML, SQL Express, WSE, etc. etc. And almost half the code is dealing with detecting and ripping out older versions of each product in the package. I won't even attempt to rationalize the logic behind bundling so many apps in one package because it's not my call to make. Doing this with Thinstall or App-V for example would have eliminated half the work and more than half of the issues we're trying to solve in the end. Alas, that golden pot of fun isn't in our arsenal and not on the table either. MSI packaging it is; and will be as long as I can tell.

So, again, I pose the question: Why are the vendors ignoring smaller customers? Why are they making this technology so unreachable? Why do the vendor reps spend so much time marketing the hypervisor stuff and rarely even mention the app-v stuff? Weird. It's just weird.

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Self-Checking the Microsoft Update Agent Self-Update Log

David M. Stein — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 23:45:00 GMT

Sometimes when I get bored, REAL BORED, I go diving into log files and see if there's something exciting there. Usually not. But sometimes I see something that makes me want to say something about it anyway. This is one of those situations.

The WindowsUpdate.log file under %WINDIR% (e.g. C:\WINDOWS) contains the play-by-play events of your Microsoft/Windows Update agent processing chores. Every time it fires up and checks for needed updates, it logs every painfully dull step along the way. But something a little more interesting is looking for where the WUAUCLT agent checks to see if it needs to update itself. This is known as "self-update".

Here's a snippet from a client log to show a section of the log that walks through the self-update verification.

2008-07-14 18:33:03:862 1164 179c Setup Checking for agent SelfUpdate
2008-07-14 18:33:03:863 1164 179c Setup Client version: Core: 7.1.6001.65 Aux: 7.1.6001.65
2008-07-14 18:33:03:863 1164 179c Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\wuident.cab:
2008-07-14 18:33:03:886 1164 179c Misc Microsoft signed: Yes
2008-07-14 18:33:15:209 1164 179c Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\wuident.cab:
2008-07-14 18:33:15:225 1164 179c Misc Microsoft signed: Yes
2008-07-14 18:33:15:229 1164 179c Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\wsus3setup.cab:
2008-07-14 18:33:15:243 1164 179c Misc Microsoft signed: Yes
2008-07-14 18:33:15:248 1164 179c Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\wsus3setup.cab:
2008-07-14 18:33:15:264 1164 179c Misc Microsoft signed: Yes
2008-07-14 18:33:15:293 1164 179c Setup Determining whether a new setup handler needs to be downloaded
2008-07-14 18:33:15:294 1164 179c Misc Validating signature for C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\SelfUpdate\Handler\WuSetupV.exe:
2008-07-14 18:33:15:334 1164 179c Misc Microsoft signed: Yes
2008-07-14 18:33:15:335 1164 179c Setup SelfUpdate handler update NOT required: Current version: 7.1.6001.65, required version: 7.1.6001.65
2008-07-14 18:33:15:335 1164 179c Setup Evaluating applicability of setup package "WUClient-SelfUpdate-ActiveX~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7.1.6001.65"
2008-07-14 18:33:15:569 1164 179c Setup Setup package "WUClient-SelfUpdate-ActiveX~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7.1.6001.65" is already installed.
2008-07-14 18:33:15:570 1164 179c Setup Evaluating applicability of setup package "WUClient-SelfUpdate-Aux-TopLevel~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7.1.6001.65"
2008-07-14 18:33:15:619 1164 179c Setup Setup package "WUClient-SelfUpdate-Aux-TopLevel~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7.1.6001.65" is already installed.
2008-07-14 18:33:15:620 1164 179c Setup Evaluating applicability of setup package "WUClient-SelfUpdate-Core-TopLevel~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7.1.6001.65"
2008-07-14 18:33:15:691 1164 179c Setup Setup package "WUClient-SelfUpdate-Core-TopLevel~31bf3856ad364e35~x86~~7.1.6001.65" is already installed.
2008-07-14 18:33:15:691 1164 179c Setup SelfUpdate check completed. SelfUpdate is NOT required.

In this rather unexciting example, you can see that this client was already using the most recent version available, so it did not request a self-update. One place where this might be useful is when diagnosing clients which are showing problems reporting up to WSUS or System Center Configuration Manager and you suspect it might not have the latest client agent version.

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WSUS Helps a WS08 Brutha Out

David M. Stein — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:03:00 GMT

I've been waiting to see if this would happen. Like most of my petty wishlist idealisms, I figured it was too trivial to be considered. However, reading the latest post on the WSUS Team Blog by Cecilia made me feel like it was Christmas morning again. Just goes to show you how low my standards and expectations really are. I get excited over stuff like this. Then again, I got excited about getting a job that took me full circle back 10 years to where I started before going to college and amassing tons of student loan debt. Amazing. :)

So, what's the big deal?

WSUS 3.0 now sports two new product categories:

Windows Server 2008 Server Manager Dynamic Installer (by far the coolest of the two in my humble opinion)
Windows Server 2008 Server Manager – Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) Dynamic Installer (the lesser, but still cool item - sidenote: can this title be any frigging longer?)

Why is this a big deal? It's further proof that the Server Manager is a force to be reckoned with. It's really a huge improvement in Windows Server 2008. See, and you thought I was going to blog and blabber on about WSUS only. Fooled ya! While this is a change for WSUS, it's really all about giving Windows Server 2008 another shot of Vitamin B-12 in the arm. MMC is extensible enough and everyone knows it. But the Server Manager is like an MMC of MMCs when you really think about it. It's another nested hierarchical level above the MMC snap-in model and it allows you to do some incredible things.

Now, stop toking on your bong for just a second and recall that there's also a System Center Updates Publisher product out there. Hmmmm... Yes, I can see it now: Groups of uber-coder youth, tapping out new Server Manager add-ins from within Visual Studio and publishing them to WSUS and System Center for mass consumption. I know - I know, never drink the bong water. It's a cool thought though. The plumbing is in place to do great things. If Microsoft has done anything right, they've built the most incredible plumbing systems ever for integrating operating systems, infrastructure management, applications and data transformation. You can build your own toys or buy them. Nice to have that choice.

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Windows Server 2008 Reliability: Put up or Shut up

David M. Stein — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 01:35:00 GMT

Ok, so I was thinking about my anecdotal ranting in my previous posting (about Windows Server 2008 reliability). Stupid me. I forgot about the nifty-cool "Reliability and Performance Monitoring" feature in WS08 (and in Vista also). If you haven't looked at that: YOU SHOULD. Microsoft really took a risk with this feature. Talk about unzipping your fly and letting it all out for everyone to see. This utility captures EVERY failure or impediment to your system's stability or reliability. Drivers, applications, updates, hardware, and of course Windows itself. It scores from 0 to 10 on overall reliability. Every time a patch is installed, it hits the score. Every time you lose facility power, it hits the score. Nothing is spared. Nothing is excluded.

Here are some screen shots of my WS08 box at home. Note that this box is meager in terms of hardware. It's an old Dell OptiPlex GX-260 with 1 GB of RAM, a 40 GB IDE drive for C: and a 500 GB IDE drive for data. It is configured as my AD domain controller, and hosts IIS7 for internal web apps, and also WSUS 3.0 SP1 for managing all the clients on my network (there are four). The data drive stores and serves up our family documents, photos, music and so forth. I back it up fairly often, but someday when I have enough money to spare I would like to get a better rig. For now, food and mortgage come first (and Sallie Mae insists on being second).

Figure 1 below - From back in March 2008, when I first took the time to establish the baseline. Note the near-perfect score during that period. The term "Disruptive shutdown" refers to power outages affecting our entire house. I have a CyberPower UPS but didn't install the correct driver for it on WS08, so it really didn't help do an automatic shutdown. It just beeped until I got fed up and went over to do a shutdown. However, as you might guess, "disruptive shutdown" means I didn't bother and just let the UPS die and take the server down with it. Not ideal, but that's not unusual in my house either.

Figure 2 below shows late June to early July 2008, and another "disruptive shutdown" and you can see a string of eight "Information" icons in the Software (Un) Installs row. Those were Windows updates being installed (successfully). The two "application failures" were from a trial version of an unnamed application which was later removed. Those definitely hurt my reliability score as you can see. Keep in mind that even after correcting a problem it takes a while for your score to recover. This makes sense actually and it's a good thing since it keeps the scoring as realistic as possible.

Figure 3 below is another screenshot from early August 2008 showing the impact of installing Silverlight updates. It's interesting to see how my reliability score is still gradually recovering from the mess you see in Figure 2 above.

Figure 4 shows my current reliability score of 8.68 as of today (August 27, 2008). The yellow warnings are from me removing remnants from the unnamed application that caused all the issues in Figure 2.

Maybe you're not impressed, but I am. Not only because of the scores, given the crappy hardware this is running on and all the roles which are loaded, but I'm also impressed with the Reliability and Performance Monitoring features. The only thing I would want to see added in the future would be a way to print or export the reports to something like XML, XHTML, PDF, XPS or even Excel. Right now you can't export anything and there's no Print option either. Print-Screen is about your only built-in option. Regardless, this is cool stuff.

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WHS or WS08: Depends on Your Quirks

David M. Stein — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:26:00 GMT

There's a lot of cool stuff going with Windows Home Server (WHS) lately. Especially now that PP1 has been out for a while and added some fixes and improvements. This short blog post by Paul Thurrott is but one example of the coolness WHS provides. But what caught my attention more than the backup and restore feature, was the comment about it sitting on a shelf. The implication being that you don't need to babysit, or even really tinker with it. It's become what I've always said a home computer needs to become in order to gain mass appeal: an appliance. Yes. Like a thermostat. You occassionally adjust it, but for the most part it does its thing and you don't have to worry about it. WHS is aimed in that direction obviously.

But in some respects so is Windows Server 2008. When the beta program ended, I did the celebratory upgrade to the RTM version and continued on. Happy. Content. Aside from just poking into the inerds to see what they look like, and how they work, I rarely have to tinker with it. It just runs. And to be totally honest here, aside from power outages (storms, etc.) my cheapy little workhorse WS08 server has NEVER had to be forcibly restarted. It has NEVER died. NEVER locked up either. Sure, patches may require a reboot here and there. But I don't have to peak through my fingers covering my eyes to worry about what scarry, obscure error and warning events are lurking in the event logs. I just don't see them very often. I don't have to restart hung or failed services. I don't have to force a restart. In short - It just friggin RUNS.

One test I did was to run a Suse 10 and a Ubuntu 8 server for several weeks without touching them and see whether WS08 required any more restarts. After four weeks, all three servers were prompting me for updates and a restart. But none had restarted for any reason on their own. Is this de facto proof that WS08 is "as reliable" as Ubuntu or Suse? No. But it did prove to me that unlike WS2K and WS03 (which is quite a bit improved over WS2K), WS08 was much more stable and worry-free. And it has remained so for as long as I've been using it. Keep in mind that this "workhorse" server of mine is a rather beat-up Dell OptiPlex GX 260 with 1GB of RAM. It serves up my photo library, music and documents and pretty much everything. God, I love it. Just thinking about it, I drift off into a foggy dream state. Me and my WS08 box running in slow-motion towards each other in a sunny field of tall grass. Someone hand me a tissue please?

Yes, I know, this went totally stupid at the end. Oh well.

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Windows Server 2008 Virtual Appliance for VMware

David M. Stein — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 12:14:00 GMT

Have you heard someone around you say something like "I would really like to play with Windows Server 2008, but I can't afford it"? Or maybe "I would like to play with WS08 but I don't have a *server* laying around to try it on." ?

You can hold their hand, offer a tissue and tell them there's help. The VMware Virtual Appliance Center has plenty of useful things to offer. One of them is a pre-built virtual machine with Windows Server 20008 and VMware Tools installed. 100 percent legal, evaluation version. And this is the "Enterprise" edition. So, you can download Virtual Server 1.x (or Virtual Server 2.0 RC) for FREE, and download a ready-to-run WS08 virtual appliance for FREE and start getting up to speed now. What are you waiting for?!

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WSUS Role Available for Windows Server 2008

David M. Stein — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:45:00 GMT

I think I blogged about this way back when WS08 was being released, but here it is "again": A download (32-bit, or 64-bit) which adds the role Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) 3.0 SP1. This was actually something that was available during the final stages of the WS08 Beta program. I was so eager for them to make this part of the initial RTM but it didn't happen and there wasn't any reason given for that at the time. I figured it was due to either something not being quite ready for RTM disk pressing or a bug was found. Who knows. In any case, this is nice to have even if it wasn't in the initial media release. Don't bother clicking on the "Knowledge Base Article" links (to 940518) because it hasn't been posted yet (as of Aug 26, 2008 anyway).

So, what's the big deal? Well, the "big" in "big deal" is entirely subjective, right? Of course it is. To some, it's a big deal because it allows you to add the WSUS server capability by checking a box in the Server Roles menu. For others it's a sleep inducer. I think it's somewhere in between. Whatever, if you have time to read this, you obviously don't have enough to do and should probably go ahead and download it and check it out.

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WSUS Itanium Cranium 64-bit Drainium Insanium

David M. Stein — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 15:49:00 GMT

Holy crap! This is getting tedious. I do not have any 64-bit or Itanium machines in my environment. If I did, it would signify one of two things: (A) I would have WAY too much time to play with computers and no life outside of that, or (B) my family packed up and left me alone in a prison on an island with nothing to do but work on 64-bit or Itanium computers.

WSUS 3.0 has indeed been a huge improvement over SUS 1.x and WUS 2.0, but there are still shortcomings you have to deal with. One of these is that it is incapable of excluding 64-bit and Itanium patches. I don't care what you do. You can select products and categories around those platforms all you want, they will still show up. It's sort of the Night of The Living Dead, part 20. Remember when SUS and WUS would choke on all the languages of .NET framework updates? You would be grinning away like you won the lottery whilst selecting only English in your options setup, only to drop your jaw on the floor in complete dismay over Korean, Croatian, Serbian and Japanese versions of the patch showing up everywhere. The fun of it all. Well, they didn't want you to feel left out in WSUS 3.0 so they've brought back ill-filtered updates for your enjoyment. Granted, it's not totally WSUS's fault. A lot of the blame rests on how the patches are built and cataloged. Many just do not publish their properties in a granular manner to allow for such filtering. That was the case with the .NET framework updates.

Here's the fun. If you're like me and don't manage any 64-bit or Itanium computers in your environment, you have to use the semi-functional "Search" feature and look for strings "x64", "64-bit" and "Itanium" and then select-all and right-click and choose Decline. I sure hope they do something to make it easier to avoid synchronizing 64-bit and Itanium updates upfront so I don't have to keep declining them all them time to keep my lists clean.

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