Each month, the team at Readiness analyses the latest Patch Tuesday updates from Microsoft and provides detailed, actionable testing guidance. This guidance is based on assessing a large application portfolio and a detailed analysis of the Microsoft patches and their potential impact on the Windows platforms and application installations.
For this December release cycle from Microsoft, we have grouped the critical updates and required testing efforts into different functional areas including:
- Networking and Remote Desktop Services.
This month’s update patches most of the core system libraries for mIcrosoft’s Remote Desktop Services options with the following testing guidance:
- Test RDP connections over the Microsoft Remote Desktop Gateway
- Try RPC over HTTP/HTTPS pathways while validating Remote Desktop broker features.
- Test out DNS signing key operations for RRAS environments.
- Validate WAN port operations (try netsh commands)
- Local Windows File System and Storage
Minor changes to the Windows desktop file system will require a test of the ReFS system (light CRUD testing required). Due to changes in how Windows handles non-English characters a test of Input Method Editors (IME’s) is required for Japanese formats.
- Virtual Machines and Microsoft Hyper-V
A minor update to a key virtualization driver will require some traffic testing and monitoring for Microsoft’s Hyper-V and virtualization platforms.
The team at Readiness has had a look at these updates, and while they are generally low-profile patches to Windows subsystems we feel that the primary testing effort this month should be on validating remote network traffic. The file system and Hyper-V changes require light testing. I think that the goal for most enterprises is to get these Microsoft updates deployed before change control “lock-down” this coming Friday (yes, the 13th).
