One of my Linux server admins asked me how Automox determines the reboot required status.
He had just installed Automox on 20+ servers, and 3 of them immediately showed a “Reboot Required” device status.
I’m sure it’s accurate, but it’d be nice to know the method for how that’s calculated. He was surprised to see it.
For Linux that’s just pulling from the operation system. We just check the distro to find the right command to run to check it, and then report back what we get from the OS. For example, on Ubuntu, you check /var/run/reboot-required to see if there’s a pending reboot.
What about for Windows devices? We had an incident a few years back where thousands of servers were patched but not rebooted, and had to retroactively go back through and figure out what systems needed reboots to schedule these with customers. There were a significant number of different locations that needed checked, specifically in the registry keys.
The article below talks through some of those, but would be interested in understanding what Automox is checking for in Windows as well… thanks!
We check Microsoft.Update.SystemInfo to see if the RebootRequired property is set to true. Something similar to this script:
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