(credit: Microsoft)

Today is the second Tuesday of February, and that means it should be Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday. It should be a big Patch Tuesday, too. First, there’s an in-the-wild zero-day flaw in SMB, Microsoft’s file sharing protocol, that at the very least allows systems to be crashed, and the patch should be released today.

Second, Microsoft is continuing to tune the way updates are delivered to Windows 7, 8.1, Server 2008 R2, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2. The company started moving to a Windows 10-like cumulative model last year, in a bid to ensure that the configurations the company tested (all patches applied, all the time) matched the end-user experience. Each operating system is getting two packages a month: a “Monthly Rollup” and a “Security Only” update.

The “Monthly Rollup” contains both security fixes and general reliability improvements, and it’s a cumulative update, incorporating both the current month’s fixes and historic updates. The intent is to make it easier to get a freshly installed system up to date; instead of installing hundreds of individual fixes, the latest Monthly Rollup should do the job.