The Wren’s Nest

Normally I’m quite conscientious about keeping up-to-date with upgrades, especially security-related ones. But in recent months my mind seemed to have been elsewhere and I let everything lapse. Oh I still read the security bulletins that went out - I just didn’t act on them. But this weekend I decided enough was enough and sat down and started updating all of my machines. All of them. I have a Mac running OS/X, a (cough) Windows XP machine and an Ubuntu machine. They all needed my attention and I made sure I gave it to them. There were innumerable software packages that had new updates/upgrades that I felt compelled to install, not counting the myriad patches from the likes of Microsoft’s “Patch Tuesday”. Backups to be done, scripts to be re-visited, drives to be analyzed and de-fragged, and yada-yada.

I sat back and thought about why some of my cron jobs weren’t executing, why Postfix was starting and a host of other imponderables and finally got everything working to my satisfaction. I don’t recommend waiting months to do this stuff; better to do it as it occurs - a lesson learned if I’ll keep to it.