I hope this turns out to be as simple a question as I think it is. With Win XP retirement approaching, some of my customers are afraid that Microsoft will eventually remove their patches from Public view. So, I have created a fixlet to pre-fetch all the XP patches.
Because I am now trying to devise a policy for storing these patches I want to know will the BigFix server delete files from the Sha1 cache if they are marked as Read-Only…?
The files are going to be stored in a secure location, but if they are located on the server they will eventually be removed as the server cache directory runs out of space. Can I mark them as read only to prevent this from happening?
I don’t know the answer to this question, but I would definitely recommend making a copy to another server for backup for all of the XP patches. That way if anything happens to them, you could restore them. You could then have a scheduled xcopy command to restore only the missing patches back to the root server.
I would also recommend backing up the XP patch fixlets from the “Patches for Windows” site in case IBM deletes them from there.