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Patching Questions

I have two questions concerning the reboots in patch scheduling. Before Iask the questions, here is the background.

The setup we have for our laptops is a Timeout period of 1020 minutes (17 hours), Timeout Action of "Reboot Later" Number of Prompts is 5, and the Re-prompt Interval is 180 minutes (3 hours). The schedule it a deploy only (the detect is done separately the night before).The reason why I have such a long timeout period is that the patches kick off at 10 PM on Wednesday night, so I figured that if no one logs into the laptop by 3 PM the next day, then we are probably safe to assume the person will not be in, and we can thus reboot the laptop. The only reason I even have it set up to prompt laptop users to reboot is that we had some people who were continually putting their laptops to sleep every night and never rebooting them, thus causing Windows 10 Cumulative Updates to not be applied.

Now the questions:

1) The 1020 minute timeout interval, does it "time out" if no one responds to the reboot prompts, or is that saying that the whole process, from the time the patching starts, to the time it ends, will time out after 1020 minutes? That almost seems to be the case since I had one user who was responding to the prompts, but it was still forcing her machine to reboot, seeming after the timeout period expired.

2) Does the laptop require a strict reboot for KACE to count it as a reboot, or does shutting it down and turning it back on get counted as a "reboot"? I ask since this same person reported that she was prompted several times for a reboot, said "no" each time, shut down the computer, and then turned it back on the next morning, but it then came up saying it was going to reboot, and this time, did not give her the Yes/No option. I am thinking KACE continued to show her machine as "Paused" until she was forced to reboot.

I have watched the best practice video for patching, and do not remember this being discussed in detail. Thank you.



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Answers (1)

Posted by: ondrar 4 years ago
Black Belt
1

The help on the Notify section for patching says:

If the time specified by Timeout elapses without the user pressing a button, the schedule runs at that time based on the value set to Timeout Action if specified. Otherwise default timeout action will take place.

"A button" being OK/Cancel/Snooze.  So that means that if the reboot notification has been up for the timeout period, it will perform the Timeout Action.  Timeout is not for the entire process, just that part of it.

Each time the reboot prompt pops up, the timeout is reset.  So if the user snoozes it at 8:01 when they get into work, at 11:01 when the 3-hour snooze is up, the reboot prompt will come back and have another 17 hour timeout.


As for the reboot, manually rebooting the computer does not count as the reboot section of a patching job.


If I can offer a suggestion, we also start patching at 10:00 PM, and I just have it do a Detect and Deploy.  That way, the patches are installed and the reboot is done before the user even gets in the next morning.

Hope that helps.


Comments:
  • Thank you. I now have a follow-up question. Let us say a patching cycle has already prompted you to reboot 4 times, and you have said yes each time. Would the fifth one then not have the yes/no option? I was just wondering if maybe I need to expand the number of prompts. - jmorton 4 years ago
    • Sorry, accidentally saved the comment too early. A Detect and Deploy patching job will continue to patch and reboot until all patches have been installed, the user shuts the computer down manually, or it times out. I think what you're referring to where the fifth prompt would not have the option available, would be when you have snoozed that particular prompt 4 previous times. - ondrar 4 years ago
 
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