What's What?
So, the IT professional version of Windows XP SP2 is finally out (see the page here). Microsoft says this version is for installing to multiple computers and that if you only have one PC to update you should wait for it to hit the Windows Update site (around August 25th according to the rumors) since there will be a more compact version available then.
Note that the network version of the download is over
266MBs!270MBs. That's right, over TwoHundredSixtySixMegaBytesTwo_Hundred_Seventy_MBs. Even
with our VeryFatPipe at work it took a little over three
minutes to download this file. Those with slower connections
should really think about waiting until it's available through
the Windows Update. You Have Been Warned.
Late Update
Installing SP2 took almost 20 minutes on my Dell 2.6GHz Pentium 4. At about the 15 minute mark things look like nothing much is happening but eventually it completed. Once you reboot and Windows comes up you _MUST_ choose either to enable the firewall now or enable it later (choose one of the radio buttons "Help protect my PC..." or "Not right now.").
Once Windows finished booting I noticed the Novell Netware login script failed to execute. Thus, none of my Novell network resources (shared drives and email via Lotus Notes) were available. Major Bother. I could live without the shared drives but I cannot get by without our internal email.
So I went to Microsoft to search in the Knowledge Base for anything but was not successful. From there I went over to the Novell site and searched. Eureka! I found a new Netware Client 4.9SP2. This is a 20MB download but was not a problem for our network. After installing and rebooting all is well. It would be nice if MS would acknowledge that Netware has a problem with SP2 (assuming here it hasn't).
In any case, I've also found that the MS firewall has failed to enable. Perhaps it's because I already have ZoneAlarm installed and running but I don't know for sure. All I know is I've tried enabling the MS firewall three times and each time I get no error message but I also don't see it enabled. I guess I'll have to check into this further but since I already have a firewall installed this is not a high priority.
Aloha!