System patching

[Meatballs12]

To make a long story short, I'm a helpdesk technician filling in for a system administrator. I've been tasked with patching a system and I don't know how. There's only a couple guys with IT experience and they aren't much help and my company doesn't seem to understand the severity of my claims. It's a windows 7 system and I have a list of 300 patches/STIGs that need to start being installed immediately. I must not be using the corrects terms because I find little online. I was told to go to the MS website and download them from there, but I don't understand what I'm actually looking for. Thanks for the help!

 

[carnageX]

Can you not run Windows Update? Are the updates controlled by a WSUS server at your company?

What do you mean by "you have to go to the MS site and download them" ? I hope you don't mean individually...because that's a huge waste of time and unnecessary since Windows Update is on the system...

 

[Meatballs12]

The system is not connected to any internet connection. It is a simulator program using multiple OSs. I was advised to "download these patches and burn them to a disk and install from the disk." Are they included in service packs or individually?

 

[carnageX]

This article will interest you; 4 tools that you can use for offline updates:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/offline-windows-update/

 

[cb600fshornet]

Can you give us an example of one of the patch names?

 

[Meatballs12]

Sure, under test ID or threat IDs it has the following number after it: 65210 and under description of vulnerability/weakness it says: MS13-021: security update for Internet explorer (2817183). I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong that MS13-021 is the actual patch name or identifier, but not sure where to go to download it or how since the patch is being downloaded and applied to a separate machine.

 

[cb600fshornet]

The MS13-021 is from a security bulletin and the number 2817183 is the update, for example "KB2817183" is that particular update. It's available at this link: Download Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer 9 in Windows 7 (KB2817183) from Official Microsoft Download Center

If you download the installer to a USB stick then you can run it on the server. Download all the updates you need onto the stick, copy them to the server and then run them

 

[Meatballs12]

Thanks so much. That's what I was looking for. If I had dozens more of these can I do individual searches and download each one? Sorry about the stupid questions, but I'm new to the IT world.

 

[carnageX]

Thanks so much. That's what I was looking for. If I had dozens more of these can I do individual searches and download each one? Sorry about the stupid questions, but I'm new to the IT world.

Yes you can do that...but why not use one of the tools I provided a link to, to make your life easier so you don't have to go through and manually search every time for each update? What if you have a system with 10's (or even hundreds) of updates that you need to apply as offline updates? There's several tools available in the link I posted - pick the one which best suits your needs. Then you can run it, it will get the patches from Microsoft for you,and you can put them on a flash drive and then install each patch (I believe one of them will also install each update for you, IIRC).

Manually doing each one is hugely inefficient and a waste of time IMO (unless you have < 5 patches to do on 1 machine).

 

[cb600fshornet]

Yes you can do that...but why not use one of the tools I provided a link to, to make your life easier so you don't have to go through and manually search every time for each update? What if you have a system with 10's (or even hundreds) of updates that you need to apply as offline updates? There's several tools available in the link I posted - pick the one which best suits your needs. Then you can run it, it will get the patches from Microsoft for you,and you can put them on a flash drive and then install each patch (I believe one of them will also install each update for you, IIRC).

Manually doing each one is hugely inefficient and a waste of time IMO (unless you have < 5 patches to do on 1 machine).

You can do them individually yes Meatballs, but actually carnage is providing a bit more practical advice in this case I think, I've never used the tools he has provided links to, but if you can get it to select the updates you want more efficiently then it's worth a shot.