One of the bad things about the monthly patch cycle is that a reboot is often required.  Now while 10-15 minutes of downtime is not a great price to pay for good security, this does work out at a system performance of 99.97% availability for 24x7 systems, so not exactly shabby.

With Server 2003 SP1 came a technology that not many people have noticed, called HOT PATCHING - where an OS patch is applied without having to reboot the system, even though a normal patch would require a reboot.  Not every patch can work in this scenario, but if you can reduce the issues, so be it.

Looking at this month, many of the patches are for office etc, but there are 3 for Windows Server, of which 2 can be applied as hot patches.

Teh one which can not is the DHCP one, so if your server is not using DHCP client, i.e. is using static IP addresses, then you do not have to rush to patch this.

In this case, you can use hotpatching.  Simple download the two downloads and run as below:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=48f03ad7-38f9-48f4-bbfc-14c52e9c942a&displaylang=en
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=c5e274a8-f962-4944-8878-6b88b1592bbf&displaylang=en

WindowsServer2003-KB917159-x86-ENU.exe /hotpatch:enable
Windowsserver2003-kb917537-x86-enu /norestart /hotpatch:enable

that is it - your system will update and not need a reboot.  Amazing

ttfn

David