• The industry’s first patch management program?

    11 Oct 2007

    Apparently I was ahead of my time. Way back in 1996 I wrote and sold a program called LANUP through a consulting company a buddy of mine and I ran on the side. LANUP – short for local area network update – was designed for NetWare operating systems. I wrote it out of desperation because I was administering so many NetWare servers at the time – I needed some automation. LANUP was essentially what we now call patch management programs – without all the bell and whistle “management” functions. I apparently didn’t fully comprehend the value of it at the time. After all, this was waaay before the Internet took off and before OS security threats were a big problem – especially for NetWare.

    Well, I recently came across the original ad I snail-mailed to potential clients at the time (K-12 school systems). Check it out:
    So, a fully-patched NetWare server once per quarter for only $89! Keep in mind this was back when you had to manually download (usually from CompuServe) and install (often from floppy disk) each and every patch for the NetWare OS. In fact, LANUP ran directly off a floppy disk! It was quite fast too – I wrote it in C making native NetWare IPX calls via netx and VLM clients (remember those?). The program even had some embedded assembly language to speed things up. Woooooo. 🙂

    Good old LANUP….Definitely one of those “could’ve been a gazillionaire” moments had I pursued my idea I suppose. Oh well, life goes on!

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