XP ;latest update had critical issues?

May 23, 2012

There were some critical security issues with May 8th's Windows XP update, and now Microsoft has provided some help on how to repair complications created by its rapidly aging operating system.

Specifically, these issues brought pain to Windows XP users and system admins who have installed the .NET framework on the OS.

In fact, the issue seems to involve not just one update but three to be specific-- updates KB2633880, KB2518864 and KB2572073 going back to March 2012.

Each security bulletin downloads the updates and installs them, but then insists on downloading them again, and that's where the whole problem lies.

A post to this Microsoft Answers thread, says the bug affected a user as follows: "My PC says the patches installed successfully but as soon as I complete the installation they are back on my task bar waiting to be installed again."

 

Microsoft's guidance on how to address these issues can be found on their site and is dated as last having been reviewed on May 18th.

But some Windows XP users wrote to us yesterday to report that Microsoft's help desk service has told them “We are getting a lot of phone calls about this, and we are still waiting for a fix."

In fact, there were some quite exasperated posts from a few users on Microsoft's site written after May 18th.

At the time of this article, Microsoft has not issued any official advisory that we can detect about this. We've asked the software giant for comment and will update the story again when we learn more.

This issue affects only Windows XP but not Windows Server 2003 or any other Windows version, according to the tests we performed late yesterday.

In other IT industry news

EMC has finally launched its EMC World Conference in Las Vegas and has announced no less than forty-two new products.

First, there is the VNXe 3150, an entry-level VNX storage array, which features quad-core processors and flash memory, supports up to one-hundred drives, and has a 2.5-inch drive support.

Overall, 3 TB 7,200rpm SAS drives have been added together with dual-port 10 GbitE. And Unisphere Remote can be used to manage up to 1,000 remote VNX and VNXe systems.

Then, there's a VNX Storage Analytics suite that features the VMware vCenter Operations System inside it. There is also AppSync software to protect Microsoft apps with one click in VNX environments.

Then of course, Fibre Channel is on the roadmap for VNXe and has SMB 3 and NFS v4 support. Vblocks will come out in the second half of the year using the 3150.

EMC is also announcing two new Isilon data storage servers, the X-400 and the NL-400. The X-400 has 90 percent more throughput than the X-200, 45 percent more performance, and can provide up to more than 15 PB of storage capacity in a single cluster.

EMC says that the nearline implementation of this technology, the NL-400, "delivers storage efficiency to over 80 percent utilisation" and "data that is frequently accessed or used with business-critical applications are suited for the X-400 while older, less-frequently accessed data can be stored on the more economical NL-400".

It's highly likely that Isilon will support VF Cache cards in the near future. Sujal Patel says that VF Cache is not supported now, and that no announcement is being made, but he didn't say if VF Cache will still be supported in 2013.

In the data protection area, there is the new top-of-the-line Data Domain DD-990 system, which holds up to 65 PB of logical capacity compared to the DD-890's 28.5 PB. The 890's aggregate throughput maximum is a 14.7 TB/hour – which the 990 comfortably eclipses with a 31 TB/hour using Boost, and a 15 TB/hour unaided.

EMC says the DD-990 is the industry's fastest deduplication storage controller. Avamar 6.1 provides better Hyper-V and SAP support, as well as Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server 2012, and enhanced support for Oracle as well.

EMC says that its Multi-streaming app can speed up backup and recovery at least four times, and provides three times backup and 30 times faster block restore chores for VMware.

For its part, VPLEX, the VMAX federation server, gets an enhanced operating environment which speeds it up by 40 percent and enables it to scale twice as much.

VPLEX also gets VAAI and VASA integration so it can fit nicely into VMware virtual server environments. Atmos has been enhanced to support 100 PB as a single system across separate sites and to be more than 50 percent faster when dealing with large objects through networking enhancements. EMC has also made Atmos upgrades 90 percent faster and non-disruptive.

Atmos internet access tools now include Chrome and HTML5. The Atmos API has single-use access for anonymous users, capacity management APIs to enable quotas, and the ability to set the identifier for an Atmos object.

The SDK also includes Android support. However, Atmos nodes all have to be at the same exact code level in order to replicate data. If attempting to federate an Atmos private cloud with an external service provider using Atmos, such as AT&T, this becomes significantly complex to manage operationally.

If an external provider decides to upgrade their Atmos node, you have to upgrade yours as well in order to keep it replicating. If you want to upgrade, you must wait for your provider to upgrade first, a feature that will most likely fall in popularity with most system admins.

How would a customer attempt to upgrade multiple nodes at petabyte-scale across several locations? In the flash area, EMC's Unified Storage Division president Rich Napolitano said that the Project Thunder is in proof-of-concept trials with enterprise customers, and connects to servers using InfiniBand in a SAN.