I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
We just added up the patch sets for August 2009 to 1.3GB. Holy cow that is a lot of content to be pushing out for patching. Little bit of looking and you'll discover that the main culprit is Visual Studio.
We've seen this before for SQL patches, but the size of the patches for Visual Studio are just stupidly huge. Just don't understand why we are deploying what looks like full installers just to fix a problem. For those of you struggling to manage the disk space on your DP's, be prepared to see over a GB disappear this month depending on what you push out.
I'd recommend splitting out the visual studio stuff as a seperate patch list\package and only assign it to DP's where it really is required and that have enough disk space. If you have ample disk space on your DP's throughout your hierarchy, consider yourself blessed!
Here is the August 2009 bulletin: http://www.microsoft.com/security/updates/bulletins/200908.aspx
And here is a good break down of each patch brought to you by Justin James over on TechRepublic: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=1414