Wanted: How Do I Make My Advert Do This...

[MarquisEXB]

I service a few thousand users, and up until now we've been trying to do patch the PCs with as little user intervention/knowledge as possible. In other words no notifications, no forced reboots. However in recent light of this recent virus, we sent a package out to reboot all the PCs, because they were patched but since we don't force reboots, never rebooted.

Going forward, we'd like to change this procedure. We'd like the package to do the following:

A. Give the user a notification, that stays persistently (possibly in the taskbar) until the operation is complete (IE after the reboot).

B. Ideally we'd like the software install to happen silently, or at the worst have the software install in such a manner that the user can not cancel.

C. Force reboot of the PC. The problem with the patchinstall.exe is that the /c:XX switch only allows you 99 minutes. We'd like to give the users 24 hours to reboot, OR have everyone reboot by X date&time (Thursday 2am local time.)

The problem with most options in SMS is that you can't meet all of these. If you push the mandatory time back, the user will get a pop-up, but they can click on it, not install the software, and the notification will go away. The force reboot seems to be a problem as well. We'd like to give the user 24 hours, but using the software updates wizard (patchinstall.exe) only allows 99 minutes, which is barely enough time for an executive lunch... err I mean meeting.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks!
M

 

[tbrennans]

2.0 or 2003?

A. depends on the above Q

B. just use a /quiet switch after the patch exe

C. I suppose you could make a scheduled re-boot, but personally I only patch at night and I give no choice of a reboot. We use a scheduled night for pc's to be left on and if they dont leave it on they will get hit by the patch when they log on in the morning...eventually..

So they really can't complain if they didnt leave the pc on overnight on their scheduled night.

Take a look at

http://www.e1.com

wake on lan stuff, very useful for over night pushes

 

[MarquisEXB]

SMS 2003

 

[tbrennans]

Takes more work but you could make a vb exe popup or use autoIt to make a splashscreen that can't be moved stating the workstation is updating, but that makes more work is you are using the sus fp. Thats what I use with everything I push....unfortunately I cant attach it here

 

[MarquisEXB]

How do you ensure that you're only getting clients at night? Do you have the ad expire every morning?

 

[tbrennans]

No they definately will get it in the morning if they didnt have the pc on @ night, but I have never had a problem as long as a mandatory time is set at night, and if you use the e1 product then thats really not an issue as it will power on any machine connected to the lan.

 

[tbrennans]

ugh and not to push 1e.com (had it backwards) they also have products that schedule reboots