Why not push for SCCM, its worth its weight in gold. The more I do with it, the more I love it, I couldn’t imagine life without it to be honest… The cost of it is easily mitigated by the OT charges I am sure. jlc
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Michael Leone Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2016 11:05 AM To: [email protected]; Patch Management Mailing List <[email protected]> Subject: [NTSysADM] How best to schedule installing updates without SCCM? Right now, we set our servers to receive updates from WSUS, but not to install; they just download. We then manually install and reboot the servers, during scheduled down times. (we do this because we have application environments that need to be shutdown via web interface, before gracefully rebooting the servers). Or we used to, anyway. Now, most of my servers are at a position where they can install updates on a schedule, without manual intervention. (no need to shutdown an environment via web interface anymore) The problem is, we don't use SCCM, so we don't have an easy way to schedule updates. I only have Group Policy, and I don't know how to set that to have the servers *only* install updates during a specific time frame during a specific weekend (meaning: only install approved updates on Oct 23, between midnight and 5PM, as an example). Thoughts? Used to be, 3 of us would work overtime one Sunday and install the updates manually. Now they don't want us to need to have to do that (well, one person, as I do still have a few servers that I want to do by hand, mostly because they all depend on 1 SQL server, and if that SQL server reboots, not all the servers gracefully deal with that)
