An out-of-band (OOB) was released by Microsoft to update yesterday to address some Windows issues caused by last week’s Patch Tuesday monthly patching cycle.
Last week’s January 2022 updates included security patches and a fix for Japanese text appearance issues in Windows 11 (KB5009566) and Windows 10 (KB5009543), as well as a secret payload of issues such as unexpected restarting of Domain Controllers and VPN connections using L2TP failing.
One of the major issues that IT administrators encountered this week was discovering that Windows Server 2012 had become stuck in a boot loop, while other versions had broken Windows VPN clients and some hard drives appeared to be in RAW format (and unusable).
Many IT administrators were forced to revert the updates and many servers are vulnerable because none of last week’s security patches were applied.
Some IT administrators are becoming dissatisfied with the process and venting their frustrations on Reddit. They discovered that the OOB update would force them to first run last week’s buggy patches, putting some Domain Controllers at risk of constantly rebooting, losing access to external drives formatted as ReFS (Resilient File System), and breaking VPN connectivity.
The Verge spoke with a university IT administrator, who confirmed that they, too, had to roll back last Tuesday’s update because external ReFS drives had become incompatible with no warning from Microsoft.
Microsoft’s documentation, ReFS should only be used on fixed drives, so the department had to migrate data before running the updates again.
If Microsoft had not addressed the ReFS issue sooner, they might have assumed the drives were faulty and tried reformatting to NTFS, losing the data (that might be a good idea anyway, as other posts Reddit shared accounts of ReFS failing on them regardless of this update).
This OOB update is available to IT administrators with access to Microsoft’s update catalog and can be loaded into Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) but it does not yet appear in the WSUS catalogue, forcing administrators to manually download and install it.
Many people believe there is an uneven allocation of resources for a variety of reasons, including the fact that subscription cloud services like Azure contribute more to the company’s consistent revenue flow than a long-term supported Active Directory solution on-premises.
Fortunately, support for on-premise solutions is still available. Cliff Fisher, Microsoft’s Active Directory product manager, addressed the issues with patching the older Server 2012 R2, which erroneously reboots too quickly to accept the entire cumulative patch:
Some of these fixes are now available as an optional update for Windows 11 and Windows 10 if you go to Windows Update on your computer. There is still no fix for Windows Server 2019 as of this writing.
