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I’m trying to figure out how to automate patching. We have certain servers that need to reboot if certain other servers reboot.



My first thought was simply WMI calls or Invoke-Command -ScriptBlock type scripts, but as the scripts are run as local SYSTEM, it has no authority to query network computers.



The only other thing I could think of would be to run a script on one server, and based on the results of that script, launch a script on a different set of servers. Is this possible to do in Automox?

Get #1 to push the reboot status to #2 rather than #2 having to query #1 (since you mentioned permission issues due to SYSTEM context). So one possible solution:



#1. On the servers that have rebooted, perhaps create a scheduled task that dumps a reboot status file to a folder share?



#2. On the servers that need to reboot based on #1, check that folder share.



#3. Grant readonly access to EVERYONE on the folder share, and read/write access to the context under which the scheduled task of #1 runs?






Another approach would be to use Automox API to pass the data around (you could use TAGs).



Just remember that #2 may end up rebooting multiple times unnecessarily if the status of #1 is not updated on-time. For example, #1 has scheduled task to tag itself as needing reboot. This scheduled task runs every 60minutes. If #2 checks #1 every 15 minutes, it would end up rebooting 4 times. This logic shouldn’t be difficult to handle. Easiest way would be to use different time durations e.g. #1 = 15minutes, #2 = #60minutes.


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