Creating post action restart after a certain time e.g. 8PM

[egomez]

Good morning everyone!

Would it be possible to add post action script that will tell to bigfix its ok to restart after a certain time “8PM” but not before.

I want to start updating windows servers earlier in the day before our patch window. So by the time it starts most of the servers will be ready to reboot and bigfix will restart them after 8PM.

Or will I have to create a task/action and add it to the baseline?

[DanieleColi]

You could create a policy (a never ending task) with a time constraint and that will become relevant only on system that requires a reboot.
Or, if you want to restart only servers impacted by your baseline, set a custom setting at the end of the baseline and make the policy to be relevant if the setting exists; then, it will remove the setting and restart your server.

[egomez]

@DanieleColi

Thank you for those ideas!

[D.Dean]

We use a separate restart task for our servers. We patch between 6 PM and 6 AM but only reboot between 1 AM and 3 AM to avoid backup jobs and other important task ran by other teams

[mesee2]

How often do you run into scenarios where patches wont install due to pending reboot actions?
ie SQL Server updates and others all want things clean before updating

How do you handle exceptions like that?

[D.Dean]

We do get “failed” actions (We call deployment issues) but we also set retries 6 times with at least 6 hour between attempts.

This works for items like Office that will fail if the application is running. If for instance, a user is online and has Office open at 2 PM, the next attempt will be at 8 PM, when it is likely they user has logged off. If it still fails because the user simply locked the screen, many of our customers have reboots scheduled around 10 so when the action tries again at 2 AM, it should be successful.

I can’t really speak to SQL, we rarely have issues patching SQl and when we do, we pass it off to Server Admins or DBAs.