WSUS – Absoblogginlutely!

So Microsoft update a patch today to do with Adobe flash player and I quote “Caveats: This bulletin is for customers using Macromedia Flash Player version 6 from Adobe. Customers that have followed the guidance in Adobe Security Bulletin APSB06-11, issued September 12, 2006, are not at risk from these vulnerabilities. Vulnerable versions of Macromedia Flash Player from Adobe are redistributed with Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3, and Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.”

Now XP sp3 has only been out a couple of weeks, if that, Adobe released their bulletin in September 2006 so how on earth is WindowsXP sp3 vulnerable – surely flash should have been updated in the xpsp3 release! This seems to make a mockery of the security focus that Microsoft are meant to be working hard on and coming on the heels of the recent snafu’s with Windows updates and genuine advantage, it’s no wonder people are not very happy with patching.

Fixed! One of my servers has been failing to backup with the error “0xe00084af The directory or file was not found, or could not be accessed. Final error category: Job Errors. For additional information refer to link V-79-57344-33967” I spent ages troubleshooting the errors and trying to work out what was going on and found that it would fail to backup any file on the local hard disk of the machine.
I posted a note in the symantec forums and didn’t hear anything back, but did find a post that upgrading to 10d might fix it (not a current solution as this would mean purchasing an upgrade of the software for the exchange agent and the exchange agent is currently working)
The other solution was to stop SQL servers on the box. This server was the WSUS box and I had also recently upgraded it to version 3 of WSUS. This created (at least) two new services – SQL Server VSS Writer and Windows Internal Database (Microsoft ##SSEE). Through trial and error I discovered that stopping the SQL Server VSS Writer service meant the backup would work, which is weird as why this should affect me backing up something like c:\jobs\fred.bat which has nothing to do with SQLI don’t know.
I’m hoping that my forum posting about the problem will get a better solution but for now I’m just pleased to be able to backup my file server.

Tag Archives: WSUS

XP service pack3 vulnerability – already!

0xe00084af failure in symantec backup exec caused by wsus 3 installation