July 11, 2006

port shutdown and Flash

At work, if you don’t keep your computers up-to-date with the latest security updates, the IT department remotely shuts off your port. Since the machines all get automatically updated anyway, this doesn’t generally happen unless something goes terribly wrong. Such as has evidently happened to me.

I called the helpdesk to figure out why I had no network, and he explained that one of my PCs was missing some security update, and gave me the intranet site to go find the patch. Then he turns my port back on so I can actually get the patch, and I go to the web site.

No mention of that patch.

OK, so I go looking for it on the web. It turns out that the update, APSB06-03, is an Adobe Flash update. The web page for the security bulletin says, under the heading ‘Solution’, “Adobe recommends all Flash Player 8.0.22.0 and earlier users upgrade to the new version 8.0.24.0.”

But when I follow the download link, I’m taken to a page that lists the latest version as 9.something. But that page also informs me that my Flash version is 8.0.22.0. So I click ‘download’ (after turning off the annoying ‘also download the Yahoo toolbar’ option), agree to install some new ActiveX control, and get to the page telling me “Congratulations, you have version 8.0.22.0 now.”

Uhh…

After trying a few more times, I thought I’d try just uninstalling Flash completely. Only it’s not listed in Add & Remove programs.

So, before I left, I unplugged my PC from the network so that at least the IT scanners won’t shut down my port again. Hopefully tomorrow I can actually fix this.

(Edit 7/12 9 AM) This morning, I tried rebooting my PC. After reboot, I magically had version 9.0.16.0 of Flash installed. So at least it’s fixed, but it would have been nice if the Flash installer had told me that I was going to have to reboot.

Posted by Mike at July 11, 2006 08:01 PM