RFE: FIrefox on Mac

I stumbled onto this one in the RFE listings:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rfe/execute?use_case=viewRfe&CR_ID=65788

(voted)

@hansen_m has most of our software updates for the Mac fully automated through AutoPkg and a processor that helps it create BigFix tasks. Most of his work is open source.

AutoPkg runs nightly and checks if new software has been released from vendors through download recipes, most of which are already available on GitHub for most products. Then a recipe that knows how to take that particular product and put it into a BigFix task is run, and the final task is placed into the BigFix Console automatically. A separate job runs and finds all the newly created tasks and pushes them out to our test machines automatically. We validate the results and then publish them internally to our organization.

Now @hansen_m is using AutoPkg to do the same with Windows software.


References:

http://www.bigfix.me/analysis/details/2994767

1 Like

We do the same thing at the University of Wisconsin but we don’t have as much freedom in publishing our work.

Writing fixlets for standard 3rd party applications is time consuming so we save tens of thousands a year by auto-packaging 100+ third party applications.

3 Likes

Very cool! Shame you can’t share your work, I’d love to collaborate on this stuff!

By its nature IEM doesn’t make it incredibly easy to share content, but I’m working on a few ideas to make that easier. Another huge benefit for us is the fact that all this work is in source control management, so we can easily track changes to fixlets/tasks and use more of a devops style approach to systems management.

1 Like

I love the idea of Autopkg for BigFix, and I’m hoping to rope it into our installation this year.

In the meantime, however, I also like the idea of IBM providing content as part of the service. After all, the content service is a big part of why we ‘hired’ this product. :slight_smile:

1 Like

We use IEM for software installation as much as patching, so for us we end up creating custom tasks for most versions of most products anyway so that they can be used for BOTH patching & installation, not just patching.

We make very little use of the IEM patching sites themselves, though they are useful for auditing and other things.