SP2 causes school problems
p2pnet.net News:- Microsoft’s decision to turn SP2 loose in the same month that hundreds of thousands of students are heading back to college campuses across the US is causing major problems for some universities, says the Washington Post.
“Technology administrators at some universities have taken steps to block computers from automatically downloading the software,” it states here.
“Not only do they want to conduct more tests on the patch, they fret their networks could slow to a crawl if too many students try to download the large file at once.”
Post writer Brian Krebs quotes Anne Agee, deputy chief information officer at George Mason University, in an example of schools which have been affected. “The timing is extremely unfortunate,” she says, “It wouldn’t be so bad if we had gotten this more than a month ago, because at least then we would have had plenty of time to test it and make a decision about how we want to correct for this.”
Instead, George Mason is blocking automatic installation of SP2 on faculty and staff computers because the update interferes with software that the university uses to run faculty PCs. Classes at George Mason start next week, and university officials are still debating whether to block students from installing the upgrade as well.
Nor is George Mason by any means alone, says Krebs
For its part, Microsoft released SP2 when it did “in part to avoid a repeat of last August, when computers owned by hordes of college students arriving for the start of the fall semester were infected en masse by the Blaster and Welchia worms,” says the Post.
“The worms, which took advantage of vulnerabilities in Microsoft software, generated so much Internet traffic that some schools were forced to temporarily kick thousands of students off their networks.”
Krebs says several schools, including Brown University and George Mason, planned to circulate SP2 on CD-ROMs to avoid connecting to the Net.
But Microsoft last week warned those schools gainst duplicating and distributing the patches “without buying an expensive license that includes the right to install Microsoft programs on student PCs”.
