Service Packs, Patches, and Upgrades Oh My!

For the last week I've been eating, breathing, and sleeping one of the above. I performed three SBS 2003 SP1 installs. Don't let anyone kid you these take a looooong time to install. The actual install is not that overly complicated. The work comes pre and post install. It also doesn't help that the service packs are huge and take a long time to install. If you're preparing to install SP1 you have to read this (note it's five pages). It's hands down the best guide out there. Holla to the MVP's on this one. They did a great job.

The other upgrade I've been blessed with this week is Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0. Symantec was nice enough to publish a migration document. I had one moving from 8.0 to 10.0.... NIGHTMARE. I'm also performing a 9.0 to 10.0 upgrade today. I'm hoping it will go well. What made the first a nightmare was the legacy stuff that was on the workstations. Someone had done a partial install of Norton System Works on every workstation. This caused the 10.0 client install to barf. It was complaining that Symantec A/V 2003 was installed on the workstation. Please remove yada yada yada... Well it certainly didn't appear to be installed on the workstations. Hmm must be something in the registry. Symantec has a procedure for manual removal of their products here. After the manual removal I rebooted as instructed. When the workstation came back up it wouldn't pull and IP address from the DHCP server. Nice!!! Off I go hunting. After a little looking I find that the manual removal had me delete the Symtdi service. Well wouldn't you know it the DHCP Client service has a dependency on that service. I delete the dependency in the registry and I'm now pulling an address again, I still couldn't install the 10.0 client. GRRRR Okay now I'm getting mad. Reaching into my bag-o-tricks I pull out Process Explorer from SysInternals. What a great little tool. I manage to determine that the 10.0 client is writing an install log to C:\Documents and Settings\UserName\Local Settings\Temp. Having a look at the log file I could see that the install process was searching and finding a registry entry for SAV 2003. This registry key was not listed in the manual removal procedure. A quick search and destroy for the offending key and boom I'm now installing the 10.0 client.