Prompt for restart after x days

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(imported topic written by cemmel91)

Is it possible to set an action to NOT prompt for restart immediately after it runs its actionscript but instead ONLY prompt after, say, 5 days, if the machine has not already restarted? As far as I can tell, the options under the Post-Action tab don’t seem to allow this, but there may be some hope using the Post-Execution Action Script tab.

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey cemmel,

Hmmm… it is a bit tricky… You might try to add an action at the end of your actionscript that waited a couple days and then finished, but then your agents will be “running” the action for days and that wouldn’t be good (the agent won’t run other actions and it would be hard for you to know the status)…

You could consider doing things like:

  • Deploy your action today.
  • Deploy a separate action with a start date of 5 days in the future with force restart AND also add relevance that says that the computer has an uptime of 5 days or more… This will allow you to skip computers that have restarted since you sent the first action… The relevance would look like:

uptime of operating system > 5 * day

Ben

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(imported comment written by cemmel91)

I like it, Ben. Thanks. Would it be possible to do something like that but instead of using the uptime relevance, use relevance to look for a Pending Restart status? That way we wouldn’t be forcing users to reboot when they don’t need to.

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

That would be better… but I can’t think of a good way to do that right now…

Ben

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(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Is the bigfix agent using relevance to report it has a pending restart or is there something hard coded in the agent that when it installs a patch and the patch exits with code 3010 (I think thats the restart needed exit code), it just sets an internal flag to indicate it needs to reboot? Maybe its doing a timestamp somewhere of when it first detected it needed a restart and is comparing the last reboot time to that saved timestamp?

The scenario is that we want to push out patches over a period, say 1-2 weeks, then wait 2-3 days and then pop a message up on anyone’s PC where there is still a pending restart. We don’t want to interupt users with messages unless we absolutely have to. We are like IT Ninjas!

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(imported comment written by BenKus)

I am not sure if this is going to work well, but here is the info you requested:

Ben