For February’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft rolls out 63 updates

Networking and Remote Desktop services

• Winsock: Microsoft advises that a multipoint socket (type c_root) is created and employed with the following operations: bind, connect, and listen. The socket should close successfully.
• DHCP: Create test scenarios to validate Windows DHCP client operations (discover, offer, request, and acknowledgment (ACK)).
• RDP: Ensure that you can configure Microsoft RRAS servers through netsh commands.
• ICS: Ensure that Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) can be configured over Wi-Fi.
• FAX/Telephony: Ensure that your test scenarios include TAPI (Telephony Application Programming Interface) initialization and shutdown operations. Since these tests require an extended runtime, allocate extra time for them.

Local Windows File System and storage

• Ensure that File Explorer correctly renders URL file icons. Microsoft recommends testing the Storage Sense clean-up tool. If disk quotas are enabled, confirm that all I/O workloads function as expected.

Local and domain security

• Domain controllers should continue to support certificate logons after applying the updates.
• Kerberos: Microsoft recommends creating authentication scenarios for domain-joined systems, using local and encrypted login methods.

If you have the time and resources (VMs and networking), the Readiness team strongly recommends building a test Remote Desktop environment that includes a connection broker, remote desktop gateway, and remote desktops on virtual machines. After setting up each component, verify that all RDP connections are established successfully.

This month, testing Microsoft’s ICS functionality requires an extended test plan covering the following areas:

• Usability testing: Create test scenarios to verify that the process of enabling/disabling ICS functions as expected.
• Validation: Microsoft recommends confirming that Network Address Translation (NAT) correctly translates private IP addresses to that of the shared connection.
• Security: Ensure that ICS traffic adheres to existing firewall rules and does not create unintended security risks.

Each month, we break down the update cycle into product families (as defined by Microsoft) with the following basic groupings: