Sorry updates have been sparse of late. Don’t really have much reason for it. This past weekend Liz and I attended a wedding down in Iowa. The bride was so happy she looked about ready to explode … and would turn into a big cloud of happy confetti. 
On the way back we got to see the trees that were downed near Le Seuer on Hwy 169. Pretty serious stuff.
Monday night Liz and I had a nice “date” at home. We finally watched Pearl Harbor together (the one with Ben Affleck in case anybody is wondering). It’s the first time I’ve seen the movie since I bought it a few years back. I really enjoyed it. Listened to the soundtrack on the way into work this morning (yesterday’s music was Celine Dion!!).
Today at work started off fairly reasonably. One of the projects I’ve been working on is getting a Smartboard Sympodium ready to go for one of the distance education rooms. That took a fair amount of time this morning but I think it’s pretty much done. This afternoon I helped a co-worker set up a classroom computer with projector in the photography lab in KFA.
At 3 o’clock I had a meeting that pretty much started the downhill slide for the day. I got reminded why I detest Windows … or at least the security issues that go with it. We’re rolling out some wireless access on campus using Cisco Clean Access. We’re requiring that Windows users have up-to-date anti-virus software and that their Windows patches be up-to-date. So I think a lot of our support load is going to fall into the arena of getting people’s computers up-to-snuff … but we have a policy that we don’t work on personal computers. We didn’t get details ironed out today so I get to work on that some more tomorrow. Yay. Two hours of meetings plus who knows how much time planning.
Tonight at the end of the day I had scheduled an upgrade for our lab software license server software. This went pretty well when I did it on our test servers but of course not-so-well in production. It took me over 90 minutes to get the new software running to the point where I could connect to it with the administrator’s “console”. After that, I couldn’t get it the lab clients to connect. In the end I ended up reverting back to the old version and will have to try again later. I’m thinking we’ll eventually run this on a Windows server much as I hate the idea … simply because the Linux version seems rather hard to deal with (kill -9 should not be the “recommended” way to shut down the server daemon.)
Anyway … bedtime for me. *yawn*
I was going to suggest you look into WSUS, but I’m not sure if you want to get into the patching business. Plus, I don’t know if it works with XP Home…
Definitely write up instructions on turning on Automatic Updates in Windows… That’ll help a lot. If they’ve got Microsoft Update installed instead of Windows Update (you install it from the WU webpage) other MS products, like Office 2003…
Good luck with it. Making sure things are up-to-date patch-wise can be a major bitch. It’s a big chunk of my job, actually…