(imported topic written by ktm_200091)
I am new to big fix and am getting torched by modified patches and late released patches.
by company policy I have to release windows security patches to test groups within 2 days of release and upon successful testing the whole environment 2 weeks later.
so far:
Last month the office patch ms09-009 was re-released, I had placed the patches in a Baseline and deployed to my testers when I deployed company wide the patch didn’t go out as it was modified by big fix in the middle of the test period. I had to open new change records to re-test the patch and then annoy my end users to re-release the patch.
This month I released the patches on the 13th to my test groups and today another patch which Microsoft released on the 11th is now out.
I’m looking like a fool having to open more change records to cover these changes…
What is the SLO to release patches?
(imported comment written by BenKus)
Hey KTM,
I think your question is more about the re-release of Fixlets rather than the initial release of the Fixlets, correct? In all the cases you mentioned the initial version was released within 24 hours.
The Fixlets will occasionally change for several reasons including a change by Microsoft, new information we learn about the patch (for instance, it is common to find that there was some issue or file update problem that wasn’t fully described in the original bulletin), or perhaps we made a mistake when we initially released it.
When the Fixlets are updated, it doesn’t automatically update your baselines so you have the choice of continuing to use the older version that you tested (perhaps waiting until later to apply any changes) or you can update it immediately and then adjust your release procedure to handle whatever change.
Note that I think the changes you mentioned were from Microsoft updating the supersedence listings… We will send an announcement out about these changes when they occur to the BES Admin mailing list: http://bigmail.bigfix.com/mailman/listinfo
We certainly can’t control if Microsoft updates the patch/bulletin or if a new issue appears so I definitely understand your frustration, but we consider it our duty to get the changes in the Fixlet as soon as possible and you can make the choice of what to do. For the cases where the mistake was ours and we need to update the Fixlet to fix something, we apologize for the inconvenience and we definitely do all we can to minimize these.
Let me know if that helps answer your question or not,
Ben