DIE2self
MIS
O.k. - I'll start this one off with an interesting story that happened late last Wednesday....<br>
<br>
Our IS department is broken down in to 5 departments:<br>
1. Help Desk<br>
2. Desktop<br>
3. Networking<br>
4. Projects<br>
5. Servers<br>
<br>
Our projects team had created an SMS package to drop SP4 on all the desktops over a period of a week. They start by dropping it on PC's broken down by computer name. The first night (Wednesday) went out for A-F. These poor hapless victims - Of which I was one of - didn't know what was waiting for them the next day. Thursday rolls around and our helpdesk gets a call -<br>
User: Uh - I turned my Pc on this morning and before I could log in I got an unusual screen - blue in color with a million numbers on it.<br>
<br>
Tech on other line: {with fear sweeping over body) Uh - I better page this out to a desktop guy (Of which I was one of). They can better assist you. !click!<br>
<br>
One minute - 5 seconds later - pager goes off. User states BSOD (blue screen of death) on bootup. Please examine. This page was QUICKLY followed by 27 others before the helpdesk realized that we were dealing with something BIG!!! So 300 dead PC's later we realize that the SMS server (or SQL database - not sure yet) filled up rather quickly and just decided to - do nothing!! So SP4 was half installed on the PC's Most could be recovered with a "Repair this NT partition" from setup, but this left them flaky (as if the good ol' Dr. Watson didn't visit enough!!). So it is now Tuesday and I think we fixed the last of them. The problem is that it does not surface until the user reboots. So for all the users who have not rebooted since Wednesday (you know who you are!!) you may still be broke. We have also found that for such a user, by uninstalling SP4, it will clean them up pretty good.<br>
So to wrap all this up - If your going to install SP4 - we now suggest that your package drops the entire thing in to a temp directory of some sorts and executes on the PC. The End!
<br>
Our IS department is broken down in to 5 departments:<br>
1. Help Desk<br>
2. Desktop<br>
3. Networking<br>
4. Projects<br>
5. Servers<br>
<br>
Our projects team had created an SMS package to drop SP4 on all the desktops over a period of a week. They start by dropping it on PC's broken down by computer name. The first night (Wednesday) went out for A-F. These poor hapless victims - Of which I was one of - didn't know what was waiting for them the next day. Thursday rolls around and our helpdesk gets a call -<br>
User: Uh - I turned my Pc on this morning and before I could log in I got an unusual screen - blue in color with a million numbers on it.<br>
<br>
Tech on other line: {with fear sweeping over body) Uh - I better page this out to a desktop guy (Of which I was one of). They can better assist you. !click!<br>
<br>
One minute - 5 seconds later - pager goes off. User states BSOD (blue screen of death) on bootup. Please examine. This page was QUICKLY followed by 27 others before the helpdesk realized that we were dealing with something BIG!!! So 300 dead PC's later we realize that the SMS server (or SQL database - not sure yet) filled up rather quickly and just decided to - do nothing!! So SP4 was half installed on the PC's Most could be recovered with a "Repair this NT partition" from setup, but this left them flaky (as if the good ol' Dr. Watson didn't visit enough!!). So it is now Tuesday and I think we fixed the last of them. The problem is that it does not surface until the user reboots. So for all the users who have not rebooted since Wednesday (you know who you are!!) you may still be broke. We have also found that for such a user, by uninstalling SP4, it will clean them up pretty good.<br>
So to wrap all this up - If your going to install SP4 - we now suggest that your package drops the entire thing in to a temp directory of some sorts and executes on the PC. The End!
