Disabling Automatic Reboot on Windows

[iago]

Today at work, I had a deadline to meet an hour or so ago. Because I'm bad at that kind of stuff, I generally don't close the .doc file I'm working on, so in the morning I see it and finish it up. Not closing something is better than leaving a reminder in my calendar, because Outlook often doesn't alert me ("Error: couldn't start notification service" or something stupid like that). So instead of that, I leave stuff open.

Yesterday evening, the patch-Tuesday stuff came through, and it automatically rebooted my computer for me, effectively closing the stuff I had open. So today rolled around and, of course, I forgot about it until too late. Although it's not a big deal, it's a huge annoyance.

It seems that there are two ways to stop this. One is to stop automatic updates altogether (probably only stop it temporarily, when it bugs you to reboot), and the other is to disable auto-reboot in the GPO (actually, you have to enable "no auto-reboot" -- my brain hurts). This document goes through these:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000294.html

Hope that helps somebody!

[Skywing]

If you're using Vista, turning on presentation mode will suppress that as well, I believe.

I'd just not enable automatic installation on systems that you can't tolerate being rebooted though.  Keeping stuff running after install won't always work properly anyway, as some things tend to be in a partially updated state until you reboot (e.g. if you install IE7, IE tends to be in a broken state until you reboot for it.)

[iago]

It's a work machine running Windows XP.

Generally, I'll restart by the end of the day anyways, it's just those occasions when I'm working on a lot of stuff that I don't. I haven't had a problem between install and reboot yet, but I probably haven't used any affected programs.

[Chavo]

IIRC the newer updates don't automatically restart your machine anymore.  They just give you an extra option when you use the shutdown menu.  Maybe thats only for non-critical updates though.  I have the whole thing set to run at night so I don't even notice.

[Skywing]

Updates that are flagged as requiring a reboot will still result in an automatic reboot if you have automatic updates set in autoinstall mode (unless suppressed via GPO).

My recommendation is to separate out things that are mostly stateless and can be down for a quick reboot without much issue (e.g. web servers) from other stuff (client boxes and other things that cause noticible high-impact problems as a result of short outages) that can't tolerate a short reboot.

Avoid hosting public-accessible services on things that you won't be rebooting quicly for patches to minimize the chance that you might be forced to bring things down at an inconvenient time to patch a vulnerability in some publicly accessible service.

Not every patch needs to be applied immediately if you are careful with what sort of services you expose to the world.  Be sure to read the advisory instead of blindly assuming there's no need for urgency, though.