The forced restarts on a server are funny too. As is the feedback information to Microsoft (which iirc can not be turned off completely, only to basic, maybe there is a registry/gpo hack but i havent played with this yet).
Can't set the "active hours" to more than 12 hours to prevent restarting when it dictates, so end up disabling the update service entirely which is a complete anti-pattern to what they were trying to "achieve". I mean, the active hours stuff is a good idea, but for the love of god in a server environment it should be easy to disable automatic restarts.
If you're already using Windows Server, have it serviced by someone trained in it, and you won't see forced restarts. If i can have 100% control of it on my pro system with only out-of-the-box tools, including selection of which updates i want to install and which not, then so can you on the server version.
For one: There is no lack of control. I don't know about Home, but from Pro and up you have full and fine-grained control available if you use the correct APIs.
For the other: This is primarily a shift in their philosophy of considering every user someone who would happily endanger the entire internet for their convenience. If you're not the type of person to have received notification of this change as part of your training and/or doesn't double-check it as part of their job duties, they expect you to be the type of person who lets their servers go unpatched and infected by worms sending out spam and DDOS attacks for years.
Mind, they're not saying this out loud, but their actions speak very loud.
Might want to check that, anniversary update simple made many of the previous group policy functions, and API calls, only functional on educational and enterprise versions.
Nope, i'm using them on an up-to-date pro version. They work.
A lot of that is also misreporting and half truths by journos who don't give a damn about anything but being the first to get the clicks with the most exciting headline. For example the group policy update configuration was changed with the anniversary update to not reflect in the user update ui, but still works perfectly fine and is still reflected in the group policy ui.
You need to read up on using group policy to change this behavior. It's not reasonable to expect an end user to know about this stuff but if you're really worried about servers, you should already know this. I'm guessing that's why you were downvoted.
I'm fully aware of gpo, thanks. I was more on about the shift from the default of do not update (in server 2012) -> update and restart (as a default in server 2016)
I can't really fault them for picking the safest default option (for the user and for the network) out of the box, even if it's an option that will negatively affect uptime if not altered. That's just the world we're living in right now.
Can't set the "active hours" to more than 12 hours to prevent restarting when it dictates, so end up disabling the update service entirely which is a complete anti-pattern to what they were trying to "achieve". I mean, the active hours stuff is a good idea, but for the love of god in a server environment it should be easy to disable automatic restarts.