[VoiceOps] Broadworks Patch Religion

[Justin Randall]

With almost any piece of vendor software, patching always carries the
risk of introducing newer (and potentially more harmful) bugs.

While Broadsoft does a good job of attempting to document the interfaces
impacted by each patch, unless something is not working correctly in
your deployment, it's probably best to go by the approach of "if it
isn't broken, don't fix it".  I know they have an N-2 support policy but
this is main release and service pack based so it's not like you
couldn't get support or further patches for your issues because you
haven't installed the latest patch bundle or AP.

AFAIK on R16 you don't even need to upgrade SPs at all and can simply
stick with the R16 main release and add whichever patches you require.

Regards,

Justin Randall

-----Original Message-----
From: voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org
[mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of David Hiers
Sent: Tuesday, February 02, 2010 3:00 PM
To: VoiceOps at voiceops.org
Subject: [VoiceOps] Broadworks Patch Religion

For our entire history with BW, we've carefully researched and
selected individual patches to apply based on the functions that we
use and the issues that we see.

BW explicitly states that "customers can pick and choose the patches
they want", and they make it easy for us to do so.  This process has
worked quite well for us so far.  It takes a good deal of effort to
keep up with over 1 patch per day across the entire BW universe of
products, but we've done it and had good results.

Recently, the "open you mouth and close your eyes" idea has been
advanced, in which we would apply ALL patches, regardless of function
or issue.  We'd wait 30 days or so to let everyone else find the
problems with the contents of the default patch bundle, then just slap
the bundle on without any thinking.  We'd still test like chimps on
crack after patching, of course.

Are you picky or promiscuous with your BW patches?

Since this discussion is very vendor/version specific, we run BW R14sp9.


Thanks,


David Hiers
_______________________________________________
VoiceOps mailing list
VoiceOps at voiceops.org
https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops