think-smarter.com Blog

Auto-Update in production

November 8th, 2006

I was at a large retailer with stores in Europe and US. All the stores connected to a central transaction processing system. The setup was similar to the one in the picture below (which is from AJB software — no relation to the retailer) So all the stores connect to a system like RTS

Well it turned out that one of the software on these machines had the capability to download and self-update. The retailer was not only unaware of this but certainly believed that no such thing could be happening…Their normal change procedure was to copy every single file and keep several versions of it before making changes.

But it was happening … and did cause downtime every now or then … which was in the past attributed to flaky behavior. Do you have software which can auto-update in production: anti-virus, windows update, management packs are some examples where this commonly occurs.

Entry Filed under: Change Control