Need Help Creating Custom Actions

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(imported topic written by Mr.Smith91)

I am new to BigFix and do not know a lot about the action script language. But I am wanting to create custom actions to do a few different things:

  1. Disable Microsoft Automatic updates, Apple Software Updater, QuickTime Automatic Updates, and Adobe Reader Automatic Updater.

2.Create Scheduled Tasks (to run Disk Defragmentation and Disk Cleanup) if the tasks are not already in place.

I would greatly appreciate any help you have. Like i said i do not know alot about this yet so something easy to put into place or copy would be amazing!!! Thanks so much in advance!

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Mr. Smith,

Welcome to the forum… For each of these tasks, the trick will be to figure out how you might manually do these tasks from the command line or by setting a reg key or by running some executable. Once we have that, we can write Fixlets for each of these tasks.

Ben

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(imported comment written by Mr.Smith91)

Thanks for the reply. Any ideas on how to track down the needed registry change or command line? Would it be different for each version of Windows?

Also, I saw that BigFix has a task that disables the Java Auto Update and also keeps the user for re-enabling it. Is that possible to do for the other programs I want to disable auto updates for?

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(imported comment written by MattBoyd)

Mr. Smith,

There are certainly ways to disable automatic updates for those applications. If you do a Google search, you should be able to find the registry or config file settings that will disable them.

For scheduling tasks, you can use the command line utility schtasks.exe: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb490996.aspx . You can write relevance to verify that the task exists (or does not exist) by looking for the .job file in C:\Windows\tasks. The only downside about schtasks.exe is that there is no way (that I know of, at least) to verify the settings of the task using WMI or relevance.

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(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

We’ve written quite a few of these. No Guarantees though. I’m attaching them to this message. If anyone has a better way or updates them to improve them, please let us know.

And this is another plug for this type of functionality to come with the fixlet site “updates for windows apps”. And another plug for a community driven fixlet / task repository. :slight_smile:

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(imported comment written by Mr.Smith91)

Thank you so much jspanitz!!! I think this is just what im looking for!

I would be interested in finding more custom actions. Does anyone know if there is some sort of website or library of custom actions that people have written for download to BigFix users??