This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Since rolling back to the previous configuration will present a challenge, affected users will be faced with finding out just how effective their backup strategy is or paying for the required license and dealing with all the changes that come with Windows Server 2025.
Accidentally force your customers to have to spend money to upgrade, how convenient.
Congratulation, you are being upgraded. Please do not resist. And pay while we are at it.
Since MS forced the upgrade, you should get 2025 for free. That would probably be really easy to argue in court
Ah, but did you read the article?
MS didn't force it, Heimdal auto-updated it for their customers based on the assumption that Microsoft would label the update properly instead of it being labeled as a regular security patch. Microsoft however made a mistake (on purpose or not? Who knows...) in labeling it.
Then it's still on Microsoft for pushing that update through what is essentially a patch pipeline
MS will be sued over this and they will lose. This is not an ambiguous case. They fucked up. It’s essentially an unconsentual/unilateral alteration to a contract, which kinda violates the principle of, you know, a contract.
Uh, if they didn't ask for it, how is Microsoft going to make them pay for it?
Good luck arguing with Ms if you aren't a giant company
Misleading title. It was installed by a third-party updater, Heimdall, but MS labeled a Windows 11 update wrong.
They labelled an OS version upgrade as a security update.
Yet another reason to not do auto-updates in an enterprise environment for mission-critical services.
In an enterprise environment, you rely on a service that tracks CVEs, analyzes which ones apply to your environment, and prioritizes security critical updates.
The issue here is that one of these services installed a release upgrade because Microsoft mislabelled it as security update.
Should still be doing phased rollouts of any patches, and where possible, implementing them on pre-prod first.
For security updates in critical infrastructure, no. You want that right away, in best case instant. You can't risk a zero day being used to kill people.
Pre-prod is ideal, but a pipe dream for many. Lots of folks barely get prod.
We still stagger patching so things like this only wipe some of the critical infrastructure, but that still causes needless issues.
I'm truly, totally, completely shocked ... that Windows is still being used on the server side.
A bunch of enterprise services are Windows only. Also Active Directory is by far the best and easiest way to manage users and computers in an org filled with a bunch of end users on Windows desktops. Not to mention the metric shitload of legacy internal asp applications...
We run a lot of Windows servers for specialized applications that don't really have viable alternatives. It sucks, but it's the same reason we use Windows clients.
It must have been the same fun as when back in 2012 (or 2013?) McAfee (at least I think it was them) identified /system32 as a threat and deleted it :)
One of the few things that accursed software actually got right!
Do system administrators still exist? Honest question. I was one of those years ago and layoffs, forced back to office bullshit drove me away
yes, but we spend most of our time in meetings with cloud service vendors now.
I haven't been inside the server room for a month.
I only go in the server room to t-pose in front of the giant air conditioner to cool off.
I knew a guy with almost that exact resume, except he told me it was chickens. He worked in Lagos during the week and went back to his chickens in rural Nigeria on the weekend.
There are dozens of us (working for MSPs because in house doesn't pay as well and companies are cheap and want to outsource that cost center)!
I switched from an MSP to a unionized in-house position, doubled my salary and my days of paid time off.
I worked for a classic MSP a while back, barely lasted 3 months. Such a toxic environment, tons of pressure to spread yourself thinner and thinner.
It was one of those places where you were expected to be there an hour early, stay an hour late, and work through your lunch.
Even though that's illegal, it was never explicit, just one of those, wink wink type things. But the workload was always so heavy, you couldn't stay on top of everything unless you were working 50+ hours a week.
And of course, all salary, no overtime or double time for weekend work.
I do internal IT now, much better. Trying to get my own one-person shop going to eventually be fully self-employed. Actually, it would be really cool to become a worker-owned co-op, but that's still a faint dream.
That's my job title.
I know this has nothing to do with my home computer, but this just further affirms my decision to switch to Linux earlier this year.
Copilot just forced itself onto my personal machines again so it's just typical Windows fuckery all around.
When the OS becomes the virus
When reading comprehension is limited to the title.
MS mislabeled the update
Heimdal (apparently a patchmanagement) auto-installed the falsely labeled update.
If OP (this was reported by a Redditor on r/sysadmin) and their company is unable to properly set grace periods for windows updates I can't help them either.
IMHO you are supposed to manually review and release updates either on a WSUS or the management interface of your patching solution.
Not just "Hehe, auto install and see what happens".
And if you do that shit, set a timeout for 14 days at least for uncritical rated updates.
Hate to be that guy but if you automatically patch critical infrastructure or apply patches without reading their description first, you kinda did it to yourself. There’s a very good reason not a single Linux distribution patches itself (by default) and wants you to read and understand the packages you’re updating and their potential effects on your system
While you are generally correct, in this case the release notes labeled this as a security update and not an OS upgrade. The fault for this is Microsoft's not the sysadmin.
Many distros (at least Ubuntu) auto-installs security updates, and here a mislabeled "security update" was auto-installed. This is not the fault of the sysadmins.
Crowdstrike moment
Meanwhile I've still got customers who are running CentOS 6.
We have an app running on CentOS 6. The vendor of the app informed us they expect to have a new version that can run on RHEL 8 by the end of the year - 2025.
"Labeling error"
Lol, okay.
Why do my windows upgrades never run this smoothly?
