Patch Management

matchey

would be very interested to hear what you guys use in work to role
out patches to windows desktops-do yous put them on2cd's and run around patching them individually?

we are evaluating a couple of products at the minute SUS which is free from ms & zenworks from Novell.

please comment

thankyou

2lazybutsmart

Well not 2 Cd's -that i'm sure of. I think the "guys by the wires" run a script on log-in and then the patch runs in the local compter after it's saved on the local harddisk. Kinda saves them some time.

I remember how they ran the security patch for one of those viruses. Everybody just came in the morning and had his computer patched in a few seconds/minutes. It slightly resembles the way our Corporate Edition antivirus works. The definitions are downloaded on the sever, but everybody get's the latest files without having to deal with the files themselves.

ah--and some friends of mine use pcanywhere in their network for deploying patches . 'tis a cool program.

matchey

login scripts work fine on w95/98 pc's but some patches wont run on w2k and xp unless the users have admin rights(which is not a good idea)

also if you try to install a large patch via the login scipt it can kill the network/bandwidth

you need a product that trickles the patch to the pc ?

any ideas ?

halflife78

I am not sure if I am following your question correctly as I am not the systems administrator at my site, or if you are even talking about a corporate type environment, but at my companies site we use a program called "Imagecast" to load systems on the floor. We have 3 system types on our floor, our systems admin has built a load for each of these. They have made floppy disk that they go and run on the system that automatically reloads the system from the server.

For patches and updates I am not sure how it works, some how they have it setup to where the system is updated automatically each day as a person on the floor logs into it. We have 600 systems so this makes it easier.