[plug] windows - a rant

[Ryan]

On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 11:54, Ben Jensz wrote:
> Garry wrote:
> 
> >
> > Decided to do a XP update this morning. What a trauma.
> >
> I find that on our internet connection at work (1.5Mbit ADSL), 
> downloading the updates is the quickest part of the whole process.  What 
> gets me is typically the installing part of it seems to take forever 
> (i.e. 15+ minutes).  And we're not talking about dead slow machines with 
> miniscule amounts of memory either... even on my home PC (which I play 
> games on - so its sufficiently fast), it seems to take a long time to 
> install the actual updates as well.

Have you looked to see what the windows updates send OUT of the machine?

Most of the updates post information back to Microsoft if they can,
sometimes in the order of hundreds of kilobytes.

I was at one of our smaller sites earlier in the week and I
simultaneously updated about 5 machines.  They got the updates from my
crafty squid cache, then it was taking FOREVER to install, so i noticed
what was going on and ripped all the network cables out.  The updates
finished almost instantly and all was well.

1083724075.688  16566 10.2.1.81 TCP_MISS/200 302479 POST
http://wxpsp2.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/isapi/pstream3.dll/wxp/WindowsXP-KB837001-x86-ENU.psf - DIRECT/64.70.33.119 application/octet-stream
1083724175.038  49084 10.2.1.81 TCP_MISS/200 935730 POST
http://wxpsp2.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/isapi/pstream3.dll/wxp/WindowsXP-KB828741-x86-ENU.psf - DIRECT/64.70.33.119 application/octet-stream
1083724232.816  25612 10.2.1.81 TCP_MISS/200 454443 POST
http://wxpsp2.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/isapi/pstream3.dll/wxp/WindowsXP-KB835732-x86-ENU.psf - DIRECT/64.70.33.119 application/octet-stream
1083724516.514   2474 10.2.1.81 TCP_MISS/200 15246 POST
http://wxpsp2.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/isapi/pstream3.dll/wxp/WindowsXP-KB826939-x86-ENU.psf - DIRECT/216.64.193.20 application/octet-stream
1083724586.248   6625 10.2.1.81 TCP_MISS/200 37345 POST
http://wxpsp2.windowsupdate.microsoft.com/isapi/pstream3.dll/wxp/WindowsXP-KB824105-x86-ENU.psf - DIRECT/216.64.193.20 application/octet-stream

Why do they need that much data sent back to them?  Very scary.

If I could be bothered I'd capture one with ethereal etc. but as yet I
haven't been bothered :)

Ryan