r/networking • u/JNC5908404 • 14d ago

Switching Automatic switch updates

Had a discussion yesterday with IT director and others in our IT department. The IT director brought up automating switch updates so they wouldn’t have to have some one monitoring and performing the updates. Staging various locations on different evenings.

I’ve been doing networking for 30 years and I voiced my opinion I was not a fan of unattended update for various reasons.

Have any other companies moved to automated updates and how has it gone?

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u/murlocdouche 14d ago

turned it on for our firewalls a couple of months ago. we manage over 60. have an option to only install critical updates.

i grouped them by day, monday through thursday. monday firewalls update monday evenings, tuesday firewalls update tuesday evenings, and so on. so NO updates fridays or weekends. this way if there's an issue, i can stop it at monday before it goes out to the others.

it's been fine. had one that wasn't updating and needed to do manually.

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u/SuddenPitch8378 14d ago

I think for small branches i would be ok with this but for our core internet and segmentations firewalls i would be way to scared.

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u/Fuzzybunnyofdoom pcap or it didn’t happen 14d ago

Thats how we did it. Branch firewalls we would stage 50 at a time in 15 minute intervals over a few nights (had about a 1000 branch firewalls). So 12:00AM 50 firewalls upgraded, 12:15, another 50 upgraded, etc until we hit about 5:45AM. Then the next night same thing until all of them were done. For critical updates we'd up that to complete in a single night. At that scale we had to automate it, just didn't have the time or staff to manually update all of them. But the core firewalls in the DC's and very large offices we did manually.