Why This Chapter Matters

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Deploying updates is one of the most daunting and complicated tasks faced by Information Technology today. Even the most carefully planned patch infrastructures will experience problems, whether caused by Internet connection issues, mobile clients disconnected from the network, or computers that users have reconfigured. Unless you are prepared for these problems, they can undermine all your other security measures.

Problems might occur when you are deploying updates to a large number of computers, and you must be prepared to handle these problems. Understanding how to deploy updates and troubleshoot these problems is a key part of securing your network, and this chapter will provide you with detailed information about the most common methods used to deploy updates. You will also need to catch those computers that miss update deployments by assessing, or auditing, the current patch levels of computers in your network. This chapter will describe how to use the Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer (MBSA) to manually and automatically scan your network for computers that are not up to date on updates.

Before You Begin

If you fulfilled the requirements for the previous chapters, you already have the necessary hardware and software configured. You can use the computers in the state they were in after completing the previous chapters, or you can install the software from scratch. To do the practices, examples, and lab exercises in this chapter, you must have:

• A private network that is connected to the Internet and protected by a firewall. This network should not have any production computers connected to it.

• One computer. Perform a Windows Server 2003 installation with default settings, and assign the computer name Computer1. This computer must be able to resolve Internet host names.

• Add the domain controller role to Computer1, using the default settings, and specify the domain name cohowinery.com. Configure the computer to use itself as its own primary Domain Name System (DNS) server, and to use your organization’s or Internet service provider’s DNS server as the secondary DNS server.

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