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 November release cycle from Microsoft, we have grouped the critical updates and required testing efforts into separate product and functional areas including:
Networking:
- Test end to end VPN, Wi-Fi, sharing and Bluetooth scenarios.
- Test out HTTP clients over SSL.
- Ensure internet shortcut files (ICS) display correctly
Security/Crypto:
- After installing the November update on your Certificate Authority (CA) servers, ensure that enrollment and renewal of certificates perform as expected.
- Test Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC) and ensure that line-of-business applications are not blocked. Ensure that WDAC functions as expected on your Virtual Machines (VM).
FileSystem and Logging:
- The NTFileCopyChunk API was updated and will require internal application testing if directly employed. Test the validity of your parameters and issues relating to directory notification.
I cannot claim to have any nostalgia for dial-up internet access (though I do have a certain Pavlovian response to the dial-up handshake sound). For those who are still using this approach to access the internet, this November update to the TAPI API has you in mind, with a quick test required to ensure you can still connect to the internet via dial-up once you have updated your system.
