Sysadmin shock as Windows Server 2025 installs itself after update labeling error Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade. The problem was flagged by a customer of web app security biz Heimdal. Arriving at the office on the morning of November 5, they found, to their horror, …
I know they've got more lawyers, but I'd start with the line that it was their error, so I shouldn't have to pay more than my existing fees until the time I would have had to upgrade anyway (if I've got proof of typical upgrade cycles for my company then I'd use that to nominate a date).
Windows version updates are always quick, fuss-free, and quietly and without drama work exactly as the previous version did, only with drastically fewer errata and many new user-pleasing - nay, delighting - features. Plus, they never break older applications.
(Note icon. It was a toss-up between that one, the trollface, and the coffee-sprayed-on-keyboard one.)
You have got to be kidding me.
The proper procedure is Redmond sends its engineers to reinstall the original version - at its own cost - and presents its excuses to the customers that it fucked over.
I'm pretty sure this is not going to hold up in court. No way.
You have got to be kidding me.
Yes, not sure where that came from. The server license for 2019 was good for 2022, I expect similar will be true for 2025.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windowserver/forum/all/windows-server-free-upgrade-costs-from-windows/9c06469c-1c22-42f8-8297-806a96c34399#:~:text=According%20to%20Microsoft%27s%20policy%2C%20you%20can%20upgrade%20to,license%20you%20purchased%20without%20paying%20any%20additional%20fees.
Many years ago with a patching system we used, I came into a number of incidents from our German colleagues as their Acrobats were screwed.
They were licened for full v 8 or 9, but they had all been upgraded to X, which they were not licensed for and stopped lots of reports and automation..... heads would roll.
Lots of hoo har, finger pointing - mainly at me, and then eventually found that the upgrade to Acrobat X from anything previous had been miss labelled as Critical by a vendor some where, and our policy was to patch all Critical
So when we patched, we pushed patches out to all devices 3 weeks AFTER patch tuesday. First week to pilot, second week to test, then everyone else. Plenty of time for issues to be found, patches to be pulled if required - and often there was at least one.
Oh, each site was responsible for ensuring devices were in specific AD groups which we targetted for those patching runs (after all, we have no idea what a machine is or whose it is, so do not want to patch with something that gives BSD's and it is a bigwig in an important meeting?)
To make things even better for me, I checked the AD groups for the German sites and found that they were all empty, not a single machine in any of the groups. It was then pointed out to their IT management by a rather pissed regional IT manager that this was their responibility to maintain those groups, and if they had done so they would have seen the Acrobat update and we would have stopped it before mass patching
"The insistence of my German bank to require commas to separate Euros and cents, and full stops to separate thousands"
Well that is the German way of designating numbers (and that's why Excel in German locale actually creates CSV files with semicolon-separated values, not comma-separated).
I assume you're expecting the bank to use English separators as you're using their online banking in English language mode? In which case you haven't considered the scenario of a someone living in Germany who speaks better English than German using a German bank website in English language but who is from somewhere other than UK/USA/etc (e.g. French or Spanish) who naturally uses the *same* numerical separators as they do in Germany.
In a similar vein you can sometimes (often?) find online commerce sites that cannot handle scenarios like someone selecting UK as the country they're in but wanting to select French/German/Spanish etc as the language to use.
Back in the past (I was buying a suit!!), I paid with my credit card and left with my new "whistle"
Weeks later i noticed an unusual amount of £1.99 on my credit card statement.
Yup the sales assistant typed the 199 but not the 00 into the CC machine
#pileon (yeh yeh but i had no money in them days)
I'm a guest here. I expect to conform to the customs of the country... including different comma placements. Oddly enough the bank offers an English option but does not change the numeric style. It just comes as a surprise every now and then...
One thing that does rankle is that even having set everything on the laptop that I can find to use a UK locale, as soon as I set the time to Berlin it insists on using commas and full-stops in the German way - to the extent of automatically replacing the decimal point in the calculator application with a comma.
Assuming this is Windows, I find that changing quite a few pseudo-related settings can arbitrarily reconfigure some of the individual locale options for you (how "helpful"). When connected to a domain controller I can also get some of these options overwritten automatically from time to time.
I've resorted to having a PowerHell script thst changes all of these options to the ones that I like at an individual level and running that from time to time — it's all done in the Registry, which means learning some of the weird ways the options are encoded in there, but using such a script (a .reg script would do too) might help with your issue. You could have a script that changes your time to Berlin and then changes all the locale options for you, and another script that changes your time to local and does the same. Or you might find that just changing the timezone at the registry level rather than the GUI leaves all your locale options the way you like them.
Certainly helps me out because my eye starts to twitch when my dates aren't ISO 8601 :D
One of those odd Linux (Mint) things, I suppose. Thunderbird has finally realised I want my dates in dd:mm:yy, but Firefox seems immune to suggestions that I prefer UK to US spelling (and German is destroying my English 'ie' and 'ei' spelling, but that's just a side effect of living here!).
I don't worry about it, except when transferring money.
Funny story that.
I had the inverse and had to point out to my bank that they were trying to send my solicitors £3m instead of £30k for the house deposit... Only didn't happen because the screen was facing both of us and I could see them typing it out.
You'd think that would be the end of it, but then they do it A SECOND time a few seconds later, which I duly pointed out.
While I'm hopeful this would have triggered some internal anti-fraud measure, at this point I'm honestly not convinced
Yearsnyears ago when I got my first credit card, and had just moved out of home, I splurged on the essentials…in Debenhams a new duvet set, and in the local in-car entertainment shop a brand new Pioneer tape/FM head unit and 4 speakers for my battered Triumph Spitfire. The assistant and Ingor on well, plenty of chatting, he broke out the card slip machine (not electronic) and took the card imprint…remembered he hadn’t given me some accessory or other, and promptly never got me to sign the card slip. Never got charged a penny or heard any more about it.
Ah, I used to love using those machines. We only needed to use them if there was a problem using the electronic machines (network, bank, card, or $other including running the shop for most of a day during a power cut) but they made such a satisfying ker-CHUNK! as they rolled over the card and back.
Also put the fear of god into some customers as they bawled about us "cloning" their card…
Despite all general feeling that this was deliberate I believe it is far more likely to be human error.
If the upgrade is mistakenly given a patch ID then once it is in the system the assumption is that it has been approved. It requires someone to read all the associated notes to understand that it was not a patch.
This is exactly the same as the Crowdstrike fiasco however it appears to have been caught sooner and with (as far as we know) less catastrophic outcomes.
I am in no way excusing the cock up and this is one of the huge issues we have now. Everything is online, Developer teams appear to be getting more and more incompetent when it comes to testing, quality assurance and release checks. This is not just Microsoft but a general issue throughout IT.
There appears to be no responsibility, something is released that breaks stuff, "listen" to customer's grips and ignore, send out professional apologisers to smooth things over, rinse and repeat.
It's not so much "Developer teams appear to be getting more and more incompetent when it comes to testing", but the bean counters in management getting rid of all of the software testers to save money. After all, customers will report all of the problems, why pay for testing?
In most cases, it's not like we have a choice not to use their crap software, and they know it!
If Microsoft pushes the install and the end user doesn't accept even a click-through EULA, I wonder how Microsoft expects to collect on this.
If Microsoft blocks functionality based on an action they unilaterally initiated, can the end-user sue?
An interesting legal problem.
In the UK there is something in law called "unsolicited goods". Basically if a company sends you something you didn't ask for, it's yours to keep and they can't demand payment for it. But, that doesn't apply if it's a genuine mistake, such as sending the wrong item by mistake against a genuine order you had made for something else. You still aren't obliged to pay for it but quite how you request the supplier to collect the mistaken goods at their expense in this situation would be interesting.
It's designed to prevent unscrupulous companies sending out stuff and demanding payment. Might apply in this case.
Administrators are reporting unexpected appearances of Windows Server 2025 after what was published as a security update turned out to be a complete operating system upgrade.
To quote Otter from Animal House:
... you can't spend your whole life worrying about your mistakes! You f***ed up. You trusted us! Hey, make the best of it!
it seems like they are significantly worse this year than ever. SO many update and upgrade SNAFUs. It's like they have completely abandoned all Q/A testing to match the level that everyone has been talking smack about them for so long. It's getting a bit disturbing.
But also, yeah, if you deploy patches straight to prod... I mean you really should know better by now. :/
Oh Magoo you've done it again!
Old, blind and stupid - that's my excuse.... what's Microsoft's?
Both new Outlook and New Teams were cluster f*cks. If Microsoft staff were using their own products, they would have been treated to the same time wasting the rest of the world did, having to revert back to previous editions of each product.
Spelling and Grammar are still screwed, words we have been using for years are not recognized anymore, type Visio in and it only gives you vision, so they don't even recognize their own product names the dingleberries.
I bet Satya Nadella would have kicked some serious butt when his autocomplete email addresses disappeared from Outlook.
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