Integration of Patching Schedule

Customizations
1

I have to integrate patching schedule which comes from HPSM database in the form of schedule.csv and below is the snippet fo the file

HISTORICAL5,test,week3,tuesday_5_30_AM,noboot,2015p1patchgroups
HISTORICAL6,test,week3,tuesday_5_30_AM,reboot,2015p1patchgroups
HISTORICAL6,test,week4,tuesday_5_30_AM,reboot,2015p1patchgroupsics

i have exported baseline from IEM Console on the basis of above snippet i have udpate the Patch window

for example hisorical5 server should be patched on tuesday 5:30 AM local time on the first month of the year (p1) week3 and server type is test(discription)

i have 2015p1patchgroups.bes file with reboot and no-reboot option , but have BESImport utility ready to upload the schedule job , just wanted to know how to update multiple jobs and actions via BESImport utility

Any help will be appriciated.

2

Have a look at the Maintenance Window Dashboard (or Wizard) , in either the BES Support site or the Bigfix Labs site…I don’t recall which.

That gives an example where clients are Locked or Unlocked on a schedule. So you can send your patch deployments to all systems, but they will stay Locked and will not execute them until the Maintenance Window Wizard unlocks the client per schedule.

3

i got that wizard it in All dashboard , looks fine to me , but there are multiple schedules which come on weekly basis , its very difficult to create 100 of schedules via wizard that keep on changing , that’s why i asked for script for rest API?

Thanks

4

I’d consider attaching the CSV as a Site File, and have the clients parse the CSV to determine when they should patch themselves. Is there something in the CSV a client can use to identify itself (something like Active Directory Group, hostname patterns, or IP Subnets)?

You could create a custom client setting, like “PatchWindow”, and have it normally set to Closed. You could have a Policy Action to set the PatchWindow value, with relevance that parses the CSV to determine when to toggle between Open and Closed.

Then you could send the Patch Baselines to all clients, with a Constraint set to “Run only when: PatchWindow = Open”.

I’m doing something similar, but I only deal with 4 different schedules so I push the action to toggle the PatchWindow value manually.

5

Anyway, if you have the XML built already, I don’t think multiple actions should be a problem. I’m not using the REST api, but I am using the ‘ImportXML’ and ‘ImportXMLtoSite’ Javascript functions in a custom dashboard. Uploading XML files with multiple < action> < /action> stanzas doesnt seem to be a problem.

6

Hi Jason,

Can you please elaborate the options importXML and ImportXMLtoSite?

I have this CSV file which comes from CMS database with server names and patch window info.

I have created baselines with reboot and noboot options , just have to add servers in the respective schedules , that would create multiple action on the basis of time given in CSV,file is created only on the basis of hostname and time , no other info given for the time being.

Thanks