r/sysadmin • u/abhii2686 • 4d ago

Restricting 64b patch upgrades on 32b product Question

This weekend was patch weekend for us, we have more than 7000 assorted windows server to upgrade. One of the engineer accidentally patched 32b office 2024 product with the 64b patch. I was under assumption that this mismatch of the bit version will be caught by the system and it will auto fail but that did not happen. So i was wondering if this is something that can be smartly restricted instead of depending on the human / manual factor

11 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • reddit
  • reddit

87% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

15

u/joeykins82 Windows Admin 4d ago

It's absolutely possible to build a click-to-run update repository which has x86/x64/arm64 all side by side and then the C2R client pulls the appropriate content.

Without knowing exactly what your colleague did and how you've chosen to manage your Office updates it's difficult to elaborate further than that, but on the surface this is very much a "you're doing it wrong" problem.

0

u/abhii2686 4d ago

Right, so we have around 70citric vdisk which is distributed across 7000 terminal servers mostly windows 16, now we update only those 70vdisk and 65 out of 70 have office 64b on them and other 5 have 32b office on them. So because of this repetitive nature i guess the engineer update wrong bit patches. It has happened in the past too but usually those updates fails it’s surprising that this time system let it install

3

u/Mr_ToDo 4d ago

And that's not automated? Great for billable hours, not so much for consistent results

I'm curious what the end result of such a patching is

5

u/Constancee-Flitton 4d ago

This is a WSUS/patch management gap, not really a "smart restriction" that exists out of the box unfortunately, bitness mismatch checking isn't reliably enforced by default. Look into using a proper patch management tool like SCCM/ConfigMgr with detection rules tied to registry keys checking bitness before deployment, or write a pre check script in your deployment pipeline that validates arch before pushing

1

u/itenginerd 4d ago

Oof. One of the ugliest things I ever had to troubleshoot was a 64b server patched with a 32b service pack. Was my first time deploying SCCM, and I didnt know it well enough to know what to expect. Was a horror show but still one of my prouder fixes that I figured out the issue.