I have an interesting issue with Package servers and Patch management. After staging a bulletin it downloads and creates install packages for every patch within the Bulletin. this is a behavior i do not want to happen. I am unchecking the boxes as I go through the staging wizard.
The reason i not want this behavior to happen is due to Office 2010 SP1. Within this bulletin there are installs for different languages of the Offie 2010 suite. There are 8 in total that are around 300megs in size. I do not want any of the installs except for english to go out to the package servers. This is to save space, keep the packages list in the agent on each site server clean, and some of our package servers are in locations where the bandwidth is limited and could saturate the line when you are transfering gigs of data.
I have tried deleting the installs, removing the packages from the policy, and then deleting the install packages from All resources. This would work in theory but there are nightly tasks that run that end up redownloading and recreating the install packages. The two tasks i am referring to are "import patch data from Windows" and "Download Software update package"
I am somewhat frustrated with the product. I think it should just be easy to not download/create packages for an update. I really hope i am missing something because i find it absurd that Symantec didn't think of hard drive space and bandwidth considerations with this product. In prior versions of the product i was told you could remove updates from Bulletins but it didn't appear to be possible anymore. I could be missing something but when i speak to support the answer isn't coming easy. I was told to use "package servers individually with Manual Prestaging". This setting confuses me because am i supposed to check the sites or just leave them all blank?
Any help or advice is appreciated.