On decommissioning of update servers for 2000, XP, (and Vista?) as of July 2019

[heinoganda]

10 hours ago, ED_Sln said:

Update KB972187 SP3 is not needed, it is replaced by KB952069-v2, although it is older, but in addition to the logagent.exe file of the same version, there are wmnetmgr.dll and wmvcore.dll files.

There were different variants for the MP10 and MP11, especially during the transition from sp2 to sp3. Now nobody knows in advance which of the variants of the MP the user has installed. An update that is not required for the existing version of the MP will not be installed anyway. I also have 2 variants of MP 11 available, where I tested it. In addition, I assume that a user, at the later time when AU / WU / MU is no longer available to install the updates via a control file. Hardly a user would like to install the mass of updates manually.

[hydro2duo]

I suspect WU would still be up for Vista x64 but am backing up some important stuff that is likely to end up disappearing at some point in the future on http://files.56k.party/vista64/

While I'm not going to back up everything in MS's catalogue, if there are some important patches and stuff that need to be uploaded to the server please let me know.

Eventually once I've completed the backup's update catalogue collation I'll probably stick it on OneDrive also, to give MS a middle finger up their own backside  

I don't have much resources so I'm not gonna back up x86 there at all as well I can't say anything about x86 patches application if it's any different to x64 (since I don't have it installed)

Edited July 15, 2019 by hydro2duo

[PCDW_386]

Hello again 

I haven't been here for a while, so I decided to check on the topic again. I downloaded the "XP Updates2.zip" file, and as with the first one, prepared the nifty program to have them covered by the Wayback Machine 

And I'm proud to announce that almost all of those files have been saved! 

(Where almost all of them, means the Windows Update and Microsoft ones.)

Besides, for the said checked links, I decided to see if there were duplicate links on both the first and the second version files, both themselves and together in a big text file. So there are, in total, and joining the first and second text files, 5650 links: 5648 that are finally done, and 2 with slight details:

• One of them is AppLocale 1.0, which a Wayback Machine URL is in this topic, in previous pages. (I need to replace that link with the Wayback Machine one).
• The other is for WMEncoder.exe, which another Wayback Machine URL is here (I need to add it up to the list, too).

I haven't been able to check the Wayback Machine URLs. I suppose they work (haven't had enough time to find out). And for the Mediafire links, I regret to say all of them are dead (BTW, I needed to thank publicly to the person who helped me check them: you rock! ). They were from an older version of the archiving website, and the conversion to get an equivalent link redirects to a page saying that each one of the intended files wasn't found.

Finally, for the sake of simplicity, I had to break the structure of both text files to come up with the unique URLs. I can upload that list here, but it's evident that the comments and grouping are necessary texts to know which files refer to which update. Haven't thought of a mechanism to relate those data. In the meantime, rest assured that those 5650 links are on the Wayback Machine as of now!

Thank you all for your cooperation and great help! 

Edited July 16, 2019 by PCDW_386
Slight mistake

[LoneCrusader]

13 hours ago, heinoganda said:

There were different variants for the MP10 and MP11

Yes, this is important. We don't want any MP10 (or MP9) updates to get left out because the MP11 updates have the same KB numbers etc.

Same goes for IE6/IE7/IE8 - all need to be preserved, not just the latest update for the latest version.

[Usher]

On 7/13/2019 at 10:36 AM, Mcinwwl said:

I remember i was about to check this tool in the past, but I got it lost from my radar in the meantime...does this tool include POSREADY 2009 patches, or only pure XP patches after April 2014?

What is the update mechanism of it, does it download patches connecting to WU, or download them from catalog, or has its own patch repository?

No, WSUS Offline doesn't download updates for WEPOS, WES09 and POSReady 2009, they don't contain XP in their names.  Older WSUS Offline versions downloaded updates for XP Embedded, but these updates were filtered out starting from 9.2.2 build. However, you can still download version 9.2.1 and use it.

WSUS Offline downloads current WSUS database, but it also create its own database (which may provide links for third party tools, custom, non-public updates or whatever the developer finds appropriate). It's possible to run the program from Windows 7 and download needed files even when MS start to use only SHA-2 hashes - probably as long as the updates are available in Update Catalog. The program provides static links, so it will be possible to re-download some files ever later, when they are removed from WSUS database and catalog but still exist on download servers.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Usher

[Mcinwwl]

I updated the list, as @heinoganda found some character issues board did to me during copy-pasting into N++, grr....

@PCDW_386 all Mediafire links should be archived in Wayback Machine. Since servers might get dead soon, If you could make separate file with all links replaced by Wayback machine url's, that would be great. If there will be some links to be fixed manually, I'd be able to handle but 6500+ links is too much for me

[ZeroDayDefender0]

Does this mean that XP will support SHA-2 https://superuser.com/questions/802693/sha2-support-for-windows-xp-sp2-any-hotfix-or-dll-available#805113

[dencorso]

No. Not really.

[Mathwiz]

1 hour ago, ZeroDayDefender0 said:

Does this mean that XP will support SHA-2 https://superuser.com/questions/802693/sha2-support-for-windows-xp-sp2-any-hotfix-or-dll-available#805113

That article addresses using secure Web sites whose certificates were signed using SHA2. We've had that for some time. (The questioner wanted to backport the SHA2 Web certificate support to XP SP2.)

Unfortunately, using SHA2 to sign code (e.g., updates) requires support in different parts of the OS, so the support for SHA2 Web certificates doesn't really help.

[PCDW_386]

On 7/16/2019 at 1:19 PM, Mcinwwl said:

@PCDW_386 all Mediafire links should be archived in Wayback Machine. Since servers might get dead soon, If you could make separate file with all links replaced by Wayback machine url's, that would be great. If there will be some links to be fixed manually, I'd be able to handle but 6500+ links is too much for me

I can do that for the said 5000+ links , although I need to check the ones that were already @ the Wayback Machine, too (I really hope they're still alive).

Should I put the list here, as a TXT inside a ZIP file like the other ones? Where is the best place to put such a resource?

(Remember it will change as I check the other links. At least, the MS/Windows Update ones are already checked! I really wish I could do that faster, but time is what I need and don't have for the time being )

[dencorso]

On 7/14/2019 at 3:14 PM, Mcinwwl said:

List of XP updates with description and links updated with corresponding findings of @ED_Sln and @heinoganda Do not contain .net installers and Microsoft Security Essentials (to be found in separate topic)
@dencorso don't you think it should land at the beginning of the topic, to make the list visible?

Good News: It's done, now there's a download link in the 1st post...
Bad News: I've turned *YOU* into the op of this thread, so now it's up to you to keep the 1st post up to date and meaningful...  

[Mcinwwl]

@dencorso you're not the moderator we deserve, but the moderator we need ^^

@PCDW_386 most of these Wayback Machine links were tested by me recently, as I downloaded the files myself using them txt list is ok, drop it and I'll attach it in first post.

[LoneCrusader]

On 7/16/2019 at 7:50 AM, Usher said:

No, WSUS Offline doesn't download updates for WEPOS, WES09 and POSReady 2009, they don't contain XP in their names.  Older WSUS Offline versions downloaded updates for XP Embedded, but these updates were filtered out starting from 9.2.2 build. However, you can still download version 9.2.1 and use it.

WSUS Offline downloads current WSUS database, but it also create its own database (which may provide links for third party tools, custom, non-public updates or whatever the developer finds appropriate). It's possible to run the program from Windows 7 and download needed files even when MS start to use only SHA-2 hashes - probably as long as the updates are available in Update Catalog. The program provides static links, so it will be possible to re-download some files ever later, when they are removed from WSUS database and catalog but still exist on download servers.

I took a look at this tool and it seems very impressive. This video is nice for anyone who's not familiar with it. I'm not sure I would ever use the "automated installer" part of it, but it seems to be a great way to build an archive of updates even if one uses them manually. However obviously it depends on how thorough the person building the database was... and whether or not the links in the database still work. Also probably doesn't include any updates that were not offered on WU or the Catalog (assuming some of these exist) such as anything in a "HotFix by request" category. At this point I suppose we only have The HotFix Share for anything like that...

It seems one can somehow write custom Update lists; for someone familiar with the tool it might be possible to modify the working list from this thread to work with the tool.

[luweitest]

WSUS Offline seems to download way more KBs than actually needed. I found this when I built my update backups, using list from a new installed XP in Virtualbox. Some may reasonable for different computer setup, but I found a series of "daylight saving" KBs, one per year,  that should be superseded. I might cleaned hundreds of KB files at last. That may left me with a incomplete backup but I am running short of disk space, and I think the chance of re-installing XP should be low since it is so stable. :)

[i430VX]

July 19 is here, windows update is still working!