Any way to display a notification on Linux (Ubuntu)?

Is there still a 15 minute timeout where it will force an action if the user doesn’t respond?

It will behave like the patch notifications do now, where you can give them options to defer for 3 different time options, and you can specify the number of deferrals. Only when they use up all their deferrals will they be forced to reboot.

Edit: As @bryanhackett mentioned below, if the user ignores any of the notifications then after 15 minutes it will indeed assume that it can proceed with patches/reboots.

Unfortunately not - we don’t have parity on the Linux side for this feature yet.

Yes, if enabled - The user has ~ 15 minutes from receiving the notification to differ the reboot. The machine will automatically reboot if the user takes no action.

Also, is this behavior what you would want to happen, or would you prefer that missing the 15 min window defaults to a deferral instead of a reboot? Or would you want the option to configure that differently depending on your needs?

Thank you for confirming!

Would be nice to have some control over that. Users get pissed when they use the washroom and get a reboot.

Yeah I can see that happening, and we’ll add that concept to the list of future improvements for reboot notifications, for the next version of improvements.

yet.

Does that mean this is planned?

Nothing definitive on the near term roadmaps yet, so I can’t hazard a guess as to when we’ll get to that one. What’s the use case for Linux for your setup? Do you have end users running Linux on the desktop that you need to send notifications for?

Yes. The majority of our end users are running Ubuntu Desktop as their daily driver.

Good to know. I’ll send that feedback over to the product team to incorporate into their prioritization and triage process.

You can find our documentation that will help you understand Reboot deferral and custom notifications here:


https://support.automox.com/help/using-reboot-notifications

Glad to see this new feature! But I agree that forcing the reboot if no response in 15 minutes is still an issue. Defaulting to the configured deferral settings would be better than forcing a reboot in 15 minutes (when they may have stepped away). Having the ability to customize/configure that setting would be even better.

Thanks for adding your vote to that option - I’ve passed that long to the product team for future improvements to the reboot notifications.

Ok the product folks have made a ticket in Productboard that you can both vote for, as well as enter your email to be notified if/when it gets done:

Feel free to add your votes to that and any feedback you have on how you’d like it to function.

I am looking to enable the update notifications with no deferrals and a reboot notification with deferral options. Ultimately I’m looking to provide notifications for updates and reboots and deferral options only for reboots.

Hello Sextonb,


Currently there is no way of enabling notifications before patching without allowing Deferrals with those notifications. I can put in to our product team relating to this. Currently the only the reboot notifications allow you to separate the deferrals from the notification. I will bring this up to our product team as I do see the need for it.

Is your concern on giving users the ability to exit/save their work on 3rd party applications like office before patching?

Thank you Brandon. Yes that is one concern, but we are a research institute and deal with devices that are processing large data sets for many hours at a time. In many cases the processes can be manually paused, but if they are interrupted without being paused the entire batch fails and the work needs to start over. Having the ability to actively notify the researcher when patches/updates are being applied, even if they are not able to defer, are important.

Thank you,

Brad