Critical Updates - Are they necessary on clients behind firewall ???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Nevets Yennep
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Nevets Yennep

Simple question - Many opinions?
I am looking for opinion on whether critical updates are necessary to the
workstation's operating system
when you are running a Windows 2000 Server network. Our Network has 20
clients mostly Windows 2000 Pro
workstations, some XP, some ME. We have Symantec Norton anti-virus running
on all machines and
WinProxy on the firewall computer connected to the internet. There are still
several machines with dial-up
service and of course people have laptops and "A" drives.
My question is simple. Should I keep the critical update's current on the
clients? Our network IT guy is very "off the cuff" and states it is not
necessary
WHAT IS YOUR OPINION?
Please post answer to this group as my email is bogus.
Spam Kills.

Thanks,
Nevets Yennep
 
Nevets said:
Simple question - Many opinions?
I am looking for opinion on whether critical updates are necessary to
the workstation's operating system
when you are running a Windows 2000 Server network. Our Network has 20
clients mostly Windows 2000 Pro
workstations, some XP, some ME. We have Symantec Norton anti-virus
running on all machines and
WinProxy on the firewall computer connected to the internet. There
are still several machines with dial-up
service and of course people have laptops and "A" drives.
My question is simple. Should I keep the critical update's current on
the clients? Our network IT guy is very "off the cuff" and states it
is not necessary
WHAT IS YOUR OPINION?
Please post answer to this group as my email is bogus.
Spam Kills.
Click to expand...

It is absolutely necessary.
 
Of course you should. Look at this way, suppose that your firewall is donw for a day or so. Can you imagine the bugs or attacks you are opening up to!
 
Notorious said:
Of course you should. Look at this way, suppose that your firewall is donw
Click to expand...
for a day or so. Can you imagine the bugs or attacks you are opening up to!
Critical updates are *always* necessary. Imagine a laptop user contracts a
vunerability exploit (RPC or similar)outside the office, then brings his
laptop into your network. Within minutes, your entire network could be down.
Take a look at SUS server from MS - it's free - http://www.microsoft.com/sus
 
I beleive it is necessary. However it is good practice to read the bulletin
associated with the update to assess the severity of the risk and how it
relates to your environment. Personal laptops on the network is in my opnion
a high risk element. It is also a good idea to run the update first on a
couple of test machines that are configured like production machines just to
see what happens AND to make complete backups on computers including the
System State [or Ghost images, etc] before installing updates as is always
best practice - particularly servers. --- Steve
 
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