Automox Q&A

This quarter I’m working on changing the default community homepage to include more useful information from other sources, such as the latest KB articles, new features, and other news. What sorts of things would you like to see on the homepage of the community besides the discussion topics?

Now that we have the Who’s Online indicator, it’s reminding me of how many people haven’t yet uploaded an avatar picture. To be entered in this contest, make sure you have an avatar uploaded and post the story behind your avatar in this topic. The avatar doesn’t have to be a picture of you - it can be a caricature, a pretty image, a picture of your pet anteater, etc. Get your post in by the end of the decade (Dec 31st, 2019) to be entered into the random drawing. One lucky entrant will win a collection of Automox swag. P.S. The story behind my avatar is that a coworker at Spiceworks brought me back those pink ears from a gaming convention as a present. She snapped that picture of me and it turn out to be so funny looking that I continue to use it as an avatar even though it’s 10 years and about 40 lbs ago.

Are you seeing the new severity level of High showing up in your environment? Did you have to adjust any patch policies?

January 14th Windows 7 Windows Server 2008 Windows Server 2008R2 April 14th Windows 10 1709 Enterprise / Education May 12th Windows 10 1809 Home / Professional July 14th Visual Studio 2010 Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2010 September 8th System Center Service Manager 2010 October 13th System Center Essentials 2007 System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 Exchange 2010 Office 2010 Sharepoint 2010 Project Server 2010 November 10th Windows 10 1803 Enterprise / Education December 8th Windows 10 1903 Home / Professional / Enterprise / Education From here:

Looking for feedback on what the community is using for pre-patch or pre-worklet deployment testing. We currently automate medium and critical patching which has been worming fine, however I would like to identify a dynamic / automated way to test patches prior to deployment to validate the automated patching will succeed. Almost like a sandbox patch scenario. When we have patches fail we typically end up having to remote into the device and investigate as the Automox reporting does not provide enough feedback yet. If we could validate all patches prior to deployment we would have much greater success.

What are the sticking points and issues you run into when deploying or using Automox? This info helps us document workarounds and prioritize bug fixes.

What are your IT-related New Years resolutions? Get better at documenting? Learn Powershell? Here’s some other ideas if you have picked any yet: https://www.usenix.org/blog/new-years-resolutions-sysadmins

https://www.reddit.com/r/usefulscripts/ Lots of handy stuff in there, and useful for anyone creating worklets. Anyone else have any good script repositories that they use (besides Stack Exchange, of course)?

Does anyone know how to modify permissions to install a third party app on Catalina? I have been trying to remotely install an application like ITarian Remote Control or Chrome Remote Desktop however Catalina either doesn’t permit the installation at all, or will not allow the application to start once installed due to security and privacy controls. I’ve read for something like Chrome Remote Desktop that the following is required, which would need to be scripted somehow: In System Preferences/Security & Privacy, make sure check both “sh” options under “Screen Record” and also “Accessibility” Any thoughts?

We just added in another Discourse (our community platform) plugin. This one provides tooltip previews of topics. Just hover your cursor over a topic subject line and it will pop up a preview with the first couple sentences like so:

Since this is Friday the 13th, it’s especially important to not touch anything Are you on the ROF bandwagon?

Several servers stuck on a reboot cycle after Windows Update last night (Tuesday - Wednesday). This appears to be a combination of 2019-12 Security Monthly Quality Rollup for Windows Server 2012 for x64-based Systems (KB4530691) and 2019-12 Servicing Stack Update for Windows Server 2012 for x64-based Systems (KB4532920) The solution is to boot the server in safe mode and allow the update to fail. This can take a long time. I think that the way to avoid this is to manually install 2019-12 Servicing Stack Update for Windows Server 2012 for x64-based Systems (KB4532920) before the rollup, but I am still testing this. I don’t imagine this will impact too many users, but hopefully the above helps someone.

This one you have to work here to acquire, so start applying! Our model is @DanK doing his best Blue Steel

Patch Tuesday is here! Celebrate by reading up on what’s new today in the patch world: blog.automox.com December 2019 Patch Tuesday Index For the latest Patch Updates from Microsoft and third-party vendors, bookmark the Automox December 2019 Patch Tuesday Index, updated live throughout the day.

I’ve enabled the reply by email feature, which means you can now reply directly to notification emails, either to reply to a topic or a private message. When you click the reply in your email client, you’ll now see that the return email address has this format: automox+3v1a7v7ss7qto2gp58qevdg9op6aloi1@discoursehosting.net The alphanumeric portion after the + is how the inbound email notifies the community which topic or post to reply to. Don’t worry, it also checks to make sure the email address you are replying from is the same email address that the notification was sent to, as an additional layer of security. The email polling interval is 5 minutes, so it can take up to 5 minutes for your post to show up after you send the email.

I’ve added a new plugin to the community that shows who is currently here on the site. You’ll see it right below the All Categories dropdown:

Printers Projectors DNS Password resets Patching Backups 0 voters

Looks like OpenText wants to extend its portfolio: TechCrunch OpenText buys data security firm Carbonite for $1.42B – TechCrunch Carbonite has agreed to a $1.42 billion purchase by OpenText, an enterprise information management giant, ending weeks of speculation about the anticipated buyout. The deal marks a 78% pr

Include a couple that helped you in your career, and a couple that helped you in life in general. For me for career I’d have to go with: amazon.com The Practice of System and Network Administration, Second Edition Thomas A. Limoncelli, Christina J. Hogan, Strata R. Chalup 4.4 out of 5 stars,

Here at Automox we’re mostly all in the office, except for Wednesday which is work from home day. How about at your office? Do you have many users who are remote part or all of the time?

A friend of mine from the Spiceworks community, Bill Kindle, just wrote a nice article on using Powershell to automate managing your IIS sites. Check it out here: Adam the Automator – 3 Dec 19 How to Manage IIS Websites with PowerShell [Tutorial] Learn, st

Every year, Cyber Monday kicks off the holiday season. Online consumers are poised and ready to take advantage of the cyber sales to stock up on holiday gifts for family, friends and, well, themselves. But, consumers aren’t the only ones positioned for “attack” on cyberspace. Cybercriminals are also at the ready to exploit the holiday shopping season and conduct malicious campaigns like spear-phishing to deliver malware in addition to your holiday presents. Why are the holidays a prime time for hackers? According to an article in ZDNet.com, in 2017 there was a 57.5% increase in attempted cyberattacks during the holiday season, with the peak hacking period occurring between Christmas and New Year’s day. And, this followed a yea

Thanks for being patient during the downtime. We’ve migrated to a new host for our community platform, so please let me know if you see anything wrong or missing now that we’ve switched over.

Curious if anyone else is using Automox to report on security feature status of Macs, namely whether or not Firewall/FileVault/Gatekeeper are enabled or disabled. I know it’s not in the Device Detail screen. Has anyone created a worklet or some other inventive way of managing this through Automox?

Hi All, I have created the Worklet without a schedule to detect the computer setting, and assigned to the group included over 300 computer, how can I list out this computer is non-compliance on this single worklet or single policy?