Another tricky situation. For the August patches deployed to one of our workstations in the Pilot Group, although the patches have been installed the action appears as not-relevant. The machine was forcefully restarted while the action was still being run. But my understanding is even after restart the status of the patch on the machine should be completed and not ‘not-relevant’. Unless the baseline is evaluated on regular intervals which I am not aware of. Along with this on which there are few systems where until last day the action status was completed however today morning they bombed “not-relevant”. I dont understand the reason why this might be happening unless the baseline is evaluated and trying to apply the patches time and again. I have already cleared the console cahe.
It depends on how the baseline is being applied, but the relevance of baseline is re-evaluated by the clients on a regular basis, even if it would never run it again due to the way the baseline is deployed.
An action status of “completed” means that it ran all of the items that were relevant at the time in the baseline at least once. This does not technically mean that the machine has all of the patches that are in the baseline, because the first component of the baseline could have been not relevant when the baseline ran the first time, but a future component made it relevant.
An action status of “not-relevant” means that the computer is not relevant to any of the components in the baseline that are fixlets or have the box checked that the component should cause the baseline to be relevant. This actually tells you more about the compliance of the system to the baseline. It is actually possible that machine could get all of the patches in the baseline from Windows Update and it would show up as not-relevant and therefore compliant just as well as a machine that had all of the patches in the baseline applied by the baseline itself.
In all of these cases, you can double click on the action status of the baseline for a particular computer and it will tell you how many times the baseline ran on the system, even in the case where it says “not relevant”.
We were deploying selecting individual computers however, the same is done through groups now. Also I noticed that reinstalling the patches also resolved the issue, Action appears completed for all machines now.
If you’re deploying via the 1st or 3rd radio buttons in the TAD, then APAR IV71504 could be the cause of an action status changing after it has completed. This was fixed in 9.2.5.