Any effective methods to confirm KB installation and resolve restart problems?

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Hello,

I have a question regarding creating a report or analysis to check if the latest KB or a specific KB is installed on a machine.

Here’s the situation: Every Patch Tuesday, we roll out updates to all workstations. After deploying the updates, we set a deadline for users to restart their computers. We even include a “restart needed” check in the baseline to ensure the system prompts for a restart up to three times if necessary.

Despite these measures, we still find that over 50% of our environment remains stuck at “pending restart.” When we manually check these computers, the KB appears to be successfully installed.

Given this, I’m looking for a way to create an analysis that can verify if a specific KB is indeed installed. Ideally, it would be great if the analysis could capture the KB status for each action, although I suspect that might be challenging.

Do any of you have any suggestions or workarounds for this issue?

Thanks in advance!

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It is not uncommon for BigFix to detect a pending restart that is unrelated to the patch installation. One way to differentiate them is by using the Restart Needed fixlets from the BES Support site:

  • Fixlet ID 390: Restart Needed - Triggered by a BES Action
  • Fixlet ID 391: Restart Needed - Not Triggered by a BES Action

I have also found it useful to filter out the non-BigFix sources of restarts by using a client setting:

_BESClient_ActionManager_PendingRestartExclusions=:;

With the setting _BESClient_ActionManager_PendingRestartExclusions=:; all entries in the Microsoft registry key HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session ManagerPendingFileRenameOperations are ignored because every entry is a path containing always a colon.

Source: BigFix - Clear those Pesky Pending Restart Flags | LinkedIn

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Hello @itsmpro92 explain to me something. If I apply this setting for all my clients, does that mean it will only read pending restart status coming from BigFix Actions?

Or will it clear all pending restart detections regardless?

I still need to know if my, let’s say Microsoft KB installed successfully .

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This setting will tell the client to ignore anything not coming from BigFix. Any action you take to install a Microsoft patch has an action script line such as:

action requires restart "59f96e01b530abd39dab5d5d5801abcb8293d70d"

This tells the client that the machine requires a reboot due to the corresponding action run on that machine by BigFix.