When software vulnerabilities are exploited by worms and hackers, it’s easy to blame the patching tools. In Microsoft’s case, it’s very easy – because the company has gone after patch management in about eight different and confusing directions. That’s all about to change – with automatic update capabilities being added to each of Microsoft’s products and a common engine to assess what products need updating. That’s in addition to the company’s efforts to consolidate its eight patch management tools into two. See what else is in store in our article this week.
Microsoft to revamp patch management software
https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0901mspatch.html?net
Netgear router quirk perturbs college
Through a software glitch, certain Netgear routers are all pinging one University of Wisconsin server to set their internal clocks. That’s a problem for the school, because there are a lot of Netgear routers out there. Here’s how the university is working with Netgear to get those routers to spread around their requests.
https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0901wisconsin.html?net
Dell to help customers corral their switches
Dell this week will offer a free tool for centrally managing its LAN switches, a move that better matches up the boxes vs. those of network gear sellers such as Cisco and Nortel that already offer such software.
https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0901dellswitches.html?net
Sears techs packing a wireless punch
As part of a $65 million project, Sears this year has outfitted trucks used by its 10,000 service technicians with a five-antenna dome that supports Global Positioning System (GPS), 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) and packet data WAN services. Each wireless technology plays a different role depending on what the technician is doing, all in an effort to make Sears’ field force more productive and help the company generate more revenue and turn bigger profits.
https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0901sears.html?net
