Using Automox

Enhancements: Added third party patching support for Dropbox on macOS and Windows Fixed problem with links to devices page from system management page and getting started cards https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

general question (as a 👶 👶 new user 👶 👶 to automox): KB4535996 (OS Builds 18362.693 and 18363.693) appears to be available to genpop (as early as feb 27, 2020, according to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4535996/windows-10-update-kb4535996). i have a few systems that are yet to be managed by our automox implementation that have pulled this down from m$. using the canned or default “patch all” policy that came with this tool, my automox clients don’t seem to have this update being handed out. is there some sort of systematic trigger that is holding this update back from being rolled out by automox? am i overlooking some config that is intended to keep me from hugging my machines to death with new updates?

We have a new KB article that lets you know which 3rd party apps need a restart to complete patching and which don’t: https://support.automox.com/help/third-party-patching-best-practices In general, the apps that won’t patch when they are running is because, while we could shut them down to complete the patching, we don’t want to risk end users losing data or having a Zoom call interrupted.

If I am patching the same applications on the same schedule for Win and Mac devices, is there any need to separate them into two separate Groups? Similarly, if I have mixed Win and Mac devices into a single group and apply Windows and OSX worklets to run on the group, will Automox be smart enough to only run the Window worklets on Windows Devices and OSX worklets on OSX devices?

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I am looking at building out some automation in presenting patching schedules and alerting the team that an upcoming patching window is approaching. In the API I know I get get a policies settings and when I look at what is presented, it isn’t something easily understandable. "schedule_days": 64, "schedule_weeks_of_month": 4, "schedule_months": 8190, "schedule_time": "02:00", That info somehow translates to every month, on the 2nd Saturday at 2AM. Is there a way of understanding/translating this to be able to actually read the policy schedule?

Enhancements: New third party patching support for Box Drive on macOS https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

Enhancement: Needs Reboot status for macOS now available https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

Enhancements: Added third party patching for iTerm2 and Transmit for Mac Added third party patching support for WinSCP for Windows https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

How are folks handling updates for new PC deployments? At the moment we’re leveraging MDT with a classic gold image and some task sequences. One of these task sequences is to check into WSUS and apply outstanding Microsoft updates. Since the base image isn’t updated frequently we could be catching up on 5-6 months worth of patches during deployment. With the move the Automox and the eventual hope of dropping WSUS completely we haven’t figured out how to address this piece of the puzzle. If we simple disable the WUA task sequence and deploy the Automox agent the PC would likely be out-of-date until the next Automox update window. Not only does this pose a security risk but that first batch of updates will likely take a while providing a rather poor end-user experience. We could keep WSUS just for this purpose but that seems like wasted effort. We could update our GPOs to have the PCs reach out directly to MS during the deployment process but we lose control of fea

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.

With today’s release we’ve added a select all option on the policy creation page, in the scheduling section. That way if you want all days selected, you can do that with one click:

Bug Fixes: Fix bug causing console requests to timeout during heavy load Fixed a problem where duplicate device names would not always sort in the same order on every page load Fixed bug where blank versioned macOS updates (ie. macOS 10.15.3 Update) did not show as pending in the console Enhancements: Added a “check all” control for selecting all dates in the policy date/calendar tool https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

does anyone know where i can hire/outsource worklet writing? i am consulting a small company with an even smaller it dept. automox seems like a great fit for them. if i could further leverage worklets, this might be a win/win.

Chrome Releases Stable Channel Update for Desktop The stable channel has been updated to 80.0.3987.122 for Windows, Mac, and Linux,   which will roll out over the coming days/weeks. A... Looks like a couple of High severi

To satisfy auditors (and myself :-))… would be great if after a scheduled patch job, a report is sent via email indicating which machines failed to patch. Would enable a workflow within ITSM to circle back to re-run/debug if needed.

Bug Fixes: Fixed pending patch count on overview report https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

Hey all! Due to some of our severs only being able to take an outage once every 6 months (cringe), we need a way to ensure newly relevant patches are applied after an initial policy execution. Short of requiring our patching administrators to manually click ‘execute policy’ again after it’s completed the first time, has anyone found a way to ensure any patches that become relevant after the initial policy execution are still applied during the same execution? This is critical for us to continue automating our patch process to be as hands-off as possible. Looking for something like a feature that applies all currently relevant and future relevant patches for the system up to the designated policy baseline. Any guidance would be appreciated!!

These are just the samples, but we’ll have boxes of them soon!

BleepingComputer

Bug Fixes: Device state will no longer show ‘When device detected’ after running a compliant policy https://support.automox.com/help/archive-release-notes-2020

The scheduled outage for 12/21 has been rescheduled to Saturday 12/28 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM MST. During this time we will be updating core infrastructure components and expect the following impact: Agents will not be able to communicate with the console Possible degraded performance and access in the console Please do not hesitate to reach out should you have any questions or concerns.

Hello there, Recently we discovered that we had numerous agents going offline randomly in Automox and we wanted to find a way to try to revive those endpoints remotely without having the team on the ground go to each endpoint individually. We have another service running on our endpoints that could also run Powershell/Bash scripts depending on OS and would run similarly as SYSTEM/Root user. We made use of this and came up with a script so that endpoints that were still online via this service and not in Automox could be fixed remotely. We’ve seen it work pretty successful thus far and wanted to share in case you might have need of it too. You could also run this script locally too to revive if you don’t have another service. All you need to change in the script is the cURL (with Access Key) which you can retrieve from Automox console. UPDATE: 15th Feb 2020. Added 2 additional functions to check if the service is running and whether there has