So, I find the relevance “pending restart” is good for some instances and for others it can be annoying to the end user. Bigfix is constantly reporting that a machine needs to be restarted when the only items installed are a new browser or a browser plugin.
I would prefer to use an if statement that verify if windows really needs to be restarted, and then run the command to restart the computer or some other script.
At this time, we use an if statement that runs script giving the end user some choices including what time of the day to restart the computer. But, with the Bigfix relevance “pending restart”, the users are being alerted that the computer needs to reboot, and again it is annoying.
Do you have some better suggestion(s) to use an If statement that checks if is mandatory to reboot?
Perhaps using something like "action requires restart “FromPatching” at the end of the action script combined with a policy action that presents the user the reboot when this property is set? We use this when deploying patching baselines. The last task in the baseline is a custom task that sets this flag and the policy action kicks in after that.
I have done something similar to what Richard describes above and it worked well. We had a separate reboot action running all the time that would prompt users and give them up to eight hours. One of the conditions on the reboot baseline was the “action requires restart FromPatching” so only those computers were prompted to reboot.
In the fixlet that will reboot computers we just added a relevance statement looking for the pending restart from the patch baseline. I had also put on a relevance for the computer uptime greater than four hours, so a computer missing many patches would not get rebooted several times in a day.
