Microsoft have released a patch, which needs to be installed on all PCs.
The simple way to make sure you have this patch is to simply leave your PCs on overnight, and Windows Update will download and install the patch for you.
If you have our PC Management Service on your support contract then your PCs will report back to us so we can chase up on any stragglers. If you wish any PCs to be updated manually the please call the helpdesk and the guys will schedule a time to do it. If you wish to update your own home PCs you can do so from the Windows Update site, http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
Please note that this security risk, although potentially severe, is not likely to have much of an effect. Most of the web sites that use this exploit have only been used to capture peoples gamer tag details, so unless you update your Xbox scores from the office you aren’t likely to fall victim!
If anyone is interested in the official Microsoft word, then the security bulletin can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/bulletin/ms08-078.mspx
I write this as I try to restore the server of a client who didn’t heed the warning. Despite having a meeting about backups a few months ago, no action was taken at the time, and now their server is down. In a way they are lucky, they will not lose any data from this, but they have lost a day (and counting, not fixed it yet!) of work in the office, and I don’t know how much that has cost them.
Fortunately we did find a backup – but it was about 6 months old. This should be enough to restore their server, but if there was a current backup the server could have been restored in about half an hour, done remotely and been covered by their support contract.
This is the first time Microsoft have put some proper effort into a system for migrating from one system to another, but there are still plenty of challenges.
Partly this is because SBS2008 is 64bit and SBS2003 is 32bit. In simple terms it means you cannot just upgrade one to the other, you have to set SBS2008 up on seperate hardware (or a virtual machine) and migrate data and settings from one to another.
The other main complication is that Exchange 2007 uses a different database format from Exchange 2003, which means it isn’t a simple case of copying data from one to another.
Microsoft’s migration techniques also do not allow you to preserve the address space. In other word the new server will need to have a new name. No big deal, just something for users to get used to.
I still need to run through some test migrations, the bad news for business owners is that it simply looks like the migration will take longer to run. The time scales that were being mentioned seemed to me that it might not be possible to complete the migration over a weekend, meaning work time downtime.