(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
After some discussion from our team regarding the WinXPe issue, we decided to remove, where possible, OS as a relevance criteria in our custom tasks for our stores environment (5000+ WEPOS machines). Instead we are focusing relevance on machine roles via a regex of the naming convention that we use in our stores. This has been a bit painful since we have several hundred custom tasks, fixlets, and analyses.
The suggestion to mass export, edit, and import turned out to over-simplify the remediation effort. Each custom item needed to be evaluated as there was not a one-size-fits-all approach. There are circumstances, albeit few, where OS truly does matter. Those needed to be updated to include WinXPe.
Since relevance within action scripts only appear to support a sub-set of relevance options, it further complicated matters. For example, in a custom task that is applicable to mulitple OS types and machine roles, it is easy to do a regex for the machine name/role in the task relevance. However that same task’s action script may (and frequently does) have section(s) that are only applicable to particular roles/names. Since action script apparently doesn’t evaluate a regex (say in an “if” statement), I have to use alternative and less sophisticated relevance. A bit clumsy, but it works.
The end result is that we are becoming largely OS independent from a custom development perspective in our stores environment. This will serve us well in the future when we go to, say, Win7 embedded. At that time we would update the handful of OS-dependent tasks and be ready to go.
We are having the same issue now as Mike has reported. The XP security patches and canned fixlets for Adobe products, etc. are now not relevant.
Bigfix, since you started down this road by changing the OS inspector, can you please update your properties, fixlets, analyses, etc. to account for WinXPe? If it isn’t possible for everything (for example old security patch fixlets), can you at least adapt canned properties and fixlets/analyses from a reference point forward (such as the start of 2010)? If so, I could patch our WEPOS machines up to that reference point prior to upgrading to 7.2.5.22 in our production environment so as not to “orphan” them patch-wise.
Since 99.5% of things for XP also work on XPe and WEPOS/POSREADY, please ensure the developers and fixlet engineers are aware of the differences so they can create correct relevance.