I have been reading quite a few posts on applying baselines and got some good ideas around setting them up (patches mainly) and had a question on reboots/notifications.
I have seen that people are creating baselines for annual/quarterly/monthly and I think this will also work best for patching servers. There are a couple scenarios we have that I would like to see how people are handling them.
Scenario 1: New server build
When building a server, we want to notify the SA that all patches/baselines have been applied and they can now reboot the system. I have so that the actions on the baselines send the notifications but it does it for each baseline. Since I cannot guarantee the order (can I?) of the actions, I do not know which one to put the notification, so I do for all. How do I only send the notification for the last baseline that runs?
Scenario 2: existing server build
This is very much the same as a new server build, but we want the server to do a reboot. This means that at the end of the final action, the server reboots. Now given the design, I do not think a server should receive multiple baselines at this point, but I am sure it will happen, so I need to make sure I handle this.
If there is a doc/forum message on this, send me the link and I will read it
This will work well if all the components are in a single baseline… This will guarantee the ordering… if you use multiple baselines, then the ordering will be guaranteed in each individual baseline, but there isn’t an ordering guarantee between baselines.
I guess that is sort of what we are doing, but unfortunately it does no help with the multiple baselines and notifications.
My current thought for the new build systems is to create a new baseline that is made up of all baselines since the last image update. Then use this in an action to send the notification. This baseline will only be relevant to systems that have been tagged as “BUILD” so that it is not evaluated against all servers.
I am still thinking on the process for the existing servers
If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know.
