Hi everyone.... has anybody applied the Java Certificate Patches, I am curious about downtime and estimated time to install.
Can you please share your experience.
Isaura,
The downtime will depend on what service pack version you're using. I applied it to my SP8 test server, and it was simply a matter of replacing half a dozen files. However, on SP7 HF1 and below, there are both files to be replaced and a patch to install, so it may take longer. Still, I would not expect it to take more than a few minutes, not including the time to stop and restart the server.
However, Blackboard has posted and then pulled the patches several times at this point to try and correct problems, some of which have been serious enough to actually prevent the servers from starting. If you are planning to try and install the patches, I would wait until as close to Sunday as you can to download the latest version available at that point. That is what I am doing with my SP7 HF1 production server.
You might also consider how urgent it really is to install the patches at this time, at least until all the issues have been sorted out. If you do not apply the patch, then after April 15 users will get a warning about an expired certificate when they go to use the equation editor, the chat tool, or the multiple file uploader. The will have either ignore the warning, or choose to accept the certificate. If you do apply the patch, users will still get that same expired certificate error until they have flushed their Java cache and restarted the browser.
So, there will be communication to your users required either way. You'll want to think about what seems best with your user community.
Mike
Hi Michael!
Thank you for your response, we are on SP6, but we were trying to post some notice to our Users to be prepared for some downtime, I agree with you on waiting till Sunday, since I bet you they are going to be working around the clock, due to this "partial patch". Thanks for your word of advise and hopefully we will get more user experiences that will shed some light to do this patch with less exposure to fail.
We will have a busy weekend. ;-)
Thanks again,
Isa