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.
Microsoft has made a major update to a minor file system management feature this month with changes to how Storage Sense updates and removed old and temporary files. There is a great video explainer and Microsoft describes this feature as,
“(Storage Sense) will run when your device is low on disk space and will clean up unnecessary temporary files. Content from the Recycle Bin will be deleted by default after some time, but items in your Downloads folder and OneDrive (or any other cloud provider) will not be touched unless you set up Storage Sense to do so.”
Our testing process raises a few concerns when the Windows file system has been updated, so we have included a few additional steps to validate this month’s changes which include:
- Run Storage Sense (this may be your first time)
- Delete all temporary files in the following path c:\users, %SYSTEM_PATHS% including nested folders
- Confirm that only old files (older than the date set in your Storage Sense settings
- Confirm that file memory.dmp (older than threshold) deletes correctly.
The following changes have been included in this month’s update and have not been raised as either high risk (of unexpected outcomes) and do not include functional changes.
- Microsoft DHCP services have been updated. Test your multi-server failover operations by sending a “failover” message to another running server
- VPN Update: connect to your enterprise VPN multiple times, with mid-session disconnects. Include basic internet browsing, large file uploads/downloads and video streaming.
- You VHD creation process will need a quick test (mount/unmount a VHD file with a CRUD test (Create/Read/Update/Delete).
- BitLocker has been updated. Turn on BitLocker and reboot. Confirm that the reboot sequence has not been affected by this update.
There has been a major update to how Windows handles file compression this month. Following the WinRAR security issues, Microsoft now supports archive formats that include tar, .7z, .rar, .tar.gz. Readiness strongly suggests fully removing (a full, validated uninstall) of WinRAR and other 3rd party compression utilities.
Automated testing will help with these scenarios (especially a testing platform that offers a “delta” or comparison between builds). However, for your line of business applications getting the application owner (doing UAT) to test and approve the testing results is still absolutely essential.
