On Thu, 2009-02-12 at 11:08 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote: > That sounds like the kiss of death for any critical service. Can't it > figure out ahead of time that this is going to happen and let the > service keep running unchanged with a warning message about needing the > update instead? You're missing the point. If the service is already running, the changes won't take effect until you restart the service with the new binaries. And the whole patching exercise is what maintenance windows are for, anyway. Note that it's critical SERVICE, not critical SERVER. The former is more important than the latter, so ideally you should be able to take down the latter in order to upgrade one implementation of the former. -I