Some of my customer VMs are Windows 7 - Veeam proxies for example. I also take backups quite seriously. Yes this is all a bit manual in some cases.
(Nearly) All of them are on the end of an IPSEC VPN that I can get at from home via the office web proxy and another VPN or via magic. Some of them have 192.168.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24 - those are on the end of OpenVPN. I wrote this: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/OpenVPN_NAT_subnets_with_s... . You have no idea what networking is about until you've had to do that sort of nonsense a few times 8)
I don't have the luxury of one WSUS to manage, we have loads of the bloody things. Some customers have pretty skilled local IT depts, some have somewhat vocal users that accuse you of resetting their passwords after spending hours doing way more than they have paid for and would not understand what you are on about in the first place. I love them all equally as any parent would ...
When I get bored of watching Windows Update I run apt update && apt upgrade && reboot on a few machines and keep a weather eye on the monitoring system. When I get really bored, I run up yaourt on my laptop or my office PC. When I've got a newly installed Win system or two to patch, I fire up a few emerge -Uvh --deep --newuse --keep-going @world sessions (I'm not really joking here) or run up genkernel.
Yes, there is the default state designed by .... bbzzzzrrt .... soz, lost it, and then there is reality. Could I also remind you that there is rather more to patching than WSUS:
* Firmware - Dell, HPE and Co have had to do rather a lot of work here and had to start again in Jan when Intel dropped the ball
* Hypervisors - I generally see VMware - that's a lot of patching and don't forget that some of them were buggered, so need excluding.
* VM vHardware versions - yep, all those little lovelies have their own hardware types to worry about
* "My fooking factory runs 24x7 - what are you going to do about it?" .... "Yes but you didn't go for the full cluster version sign I'll see what I can do" ...
You think I'm odd! No mate, my little company are well aware of automation and use it where we can but we are pragmatic and have to deal with a lot of reality.
We could of course bind our customers to our iron will and enforce our policy and stuff. They would not work on weekends or other odd hours. They would not insist on doing things their way and they absolutely would pay us on time - they generally do 8)
(Nearly) All of them are on the end of an IPSEC VPN that I can get at from home via the office web proxy and another VPN or via magic. Some of them have 192.168.0/24 or 192.168.1.0/24 - those are on the end of OpenVPN. I wrote this: https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/OpenVPN_NAT_subnets_with_s... . You have no idea what networking is about until you've had to do that sort of nonsense a few times 8)
I don't have the luxury of one WSUS to manage, we have loads of the bloody things. Some customers have pretty skilled local IT depts, some have somewhat vocal users that accuse you of resetting their passwords after spending hours doing way more than they have paid for and would not understand what you are on about in the first place. I love them all equally as any parent would ...
When I get bored of watching Windows Update I run apt update && apt upgrade && reboot on a few machines and keep a weather eye on the monitoring system. When I get really bored, I run up yaourt on my laptop or my office PC. When I've got a newly installed Win system or two to patch, I fire up a few emerge -Uvh --deep --newuse --keep-going @world sessions (I'm not really joking here) or run up genkernel.
Yes, there is the default state designed by .... bbzzzzrrt .... soz, lost it, and then there is reality. Could I also remind you that there is rather more to patching than WSUS:
* Firmware - Dell, HPE and Co have had to do rather a lot of work here and had to start again in Jan when Intel dropped the ball * Hypervisors - I generally see VMware - that's a lot of patching and don't forget that some of them were buggered, so need excluding. * VM vHardware versions - yep, all those little lovelies have their own hardware types to worry about * "My fooking factory runs 24x7 - what are you going to do about it?" .... "Yes but you didn't go for the full cluster version sign I'll see what I can do" ...
You think I'm odd! No mate, my little company are well aware of automation and use it where we can but we are pragmatic and have to deal with a lot of reality.
We could of course bind our customers to our iron will and enforce our policy and stuff. They would not work on weekends or other odd hours. They would not insist on doing things their way and they absolutely would pay us on time - they generally do 8)