Patch Management Group

Hi I need to run some jobs on servers before and after the Patch cycle. I believe there used to be a way to run program before patch cycle?  Also what tool/mechnisim is used to reboot at the end of patch cycle? 

 

Appreciate the help. 

There is no built in tool to do this. The best you could do is build a job with the pre and post patch tasks, with an intermediate task to execute the patch cycle using aexpatchutil.exe. in this case your patch agent config should be set to run far in the future and not reboot (configure the reboot into the job). Can't give specifics as I haven't done it myself, but that should get you started.

As Kyle stated set the Software Update Plug-In Policy to somewhere far in the future. Then build a task with a script starting aexpatchutil.exe /Xa /q. Make sure you set the timeout for the task high enough. We had to wrap a script around to kill the aexpatchutil.exe process as it sometimes gets stuck running.

This task you can put in a software delivery policy which you can schedule then as you want and add the jobs that need to run before and after. As it is a task it doesnt have a detection rule, so it will run immediatly.

One thing to consider is that this will only install the patches till it needs a reboot. Some patches depend on others and can only install after a reboot.  One way would to be to have a fake software with a reboot commandline that has a detection rule on the rebootrequired key in the registry under altiris/patchmanagement.