Disaster Recovery

[Guest]

Hello. I am going to be doing a disaster recovery test in a few weeks and I
have a problem with the way to get the patches installed. We will be going
offsite and there will be no internet access to the servers. The server
hardware will be different from what we use daily as well. We only have a
limited amount of time to do the test also. I have backups of the servers
and the patches burned to cd's but since there is probably over a hundred of
them it will take forever to do it this way. Is there a way I can get these
servers up to the same level as my production servers without having to
install patches one by one? Thank you for your help.

 

[Oli Restorick [MVP]]

I would look at using SUS or a third-party patching product. If you're
already using SUS, it makes things easier and I'd definitely recommend it as
a baseline patching solution, even for servers.

I haven't tested this, but if you configure a SUS server and take a backup
copy of \SUS\Contents\Cabs and then set up a test disaster recovery SUS
server and copy the backed-up \SUS\Contents\Cabs folder to the new server,
you may be able to get it to see the new patches. Other newsgroup posts
seem to indicate that copying the files in and resynching will do the trick,
but with no Internet connection you may not be able to do it. Worth
experimenting with, perhaps.

I'd also see if Shavlik (http://www.shavlik.com/) or any similar products
can do what you want.

Regards

Oli

 

[Gerry Hickman]

Hi,

Probably not much help, but this is one of the reasons I've always
maintained a patching script rather than using things like
WindowsUpdate. You could also look into SUS, which I believe could work
off-line as long as it's up to date.