Discussion on:

Patch management enhancement tools and best practices

If you want real control over patch management, Shavlik's product does a really good job!

I know it is good at the implementation, but is it also good at reporting and such?

Yep I use it for all of my sites. The reports are very nice easy to read and for people who like visual aids lots of pie charts if needed. Wonderful software.

Shavlik in an EXCELLENT tool. It can take a bit to set up, but will do patches and scans both agentless and with an agent. If you have remote offices it can be set up for use with a remote server. We use it for about 250 machines.

I just looked at the shavlik website are the tools all free?

I?ve been used Spiceworks for some patch, asset inventory, this Shavlik sees someting similar, dont you think ? With Spice Works have some firewall troubles in my domain.

Also used lansweeper demo for testing, and works fine, dont buy anything yet for patching in the office

I recommend the free, open source tool Patch Check Advanced (PCA), by Martin Paul

http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/links.html

This article: http://blogs.sun.com/patch/entry/patch_automation_tools
is how I discovered it. The article itself only includes a brief description of each tool, but the posts replying to the article are overwhelmingly in favor of PCA. I have been using it for over a year myself and I find it the most efficient way to handle Solaris patching.

since it's a perl script it is a simple one to port to ANY Unix or Unix-like os.

so any of the BSDs, GNU/Linux, MacOS, HPUX, AIX could also use this tool.

108 Servers, 1 administrator/Developer/SQL Dude and general dogs body

I close my eyes and pray!

I pray while my eyes are opened.

Perfect discussion, I am researching a solution now. Our environment is predominately Dell. Dell bought into kace.com. They have a couple different solution devices: System Management that covers inventory, asset management, software distribution, patch management and service desk features. And then System Deployment covers network os install, disk imaging, etc.

Anyone seen this?
Have not heard of Shavlik...interesting..

We just purchased the KACE KBox Virtual Appliance and are getting ready to implement. We were looking for a Help Desk solution as well as patch management and inventory and the KBox seemed to have most everything we were looking for.

Thanks meisingerc. Could you post back with some experience a little later?

Sure can we just had our kick off meeting with the Dell trainer and hopefully will be installing in the next week and have the training in July I'll post back info as I get more involved in the product.

Sorry it took so long for me to post back... So we implemented the KBox 1000 virtual appliance. Install was fairly simple we did the jumpstart training which was informative but I felt as though it could have been better it was pretty basic and there is a lot to the system. We are still tweaking the labeling and learning the software install piece and getting the users using the Help Desk System but it is very nice to be able to track user issues and have their machine inventories available. If you have any questions I could help you with feel free to ask.

SOHO's Service Desk plus is a nice solution, and there other network tools are great as well.
Soho used to be Adventnet, btw

Hey Randy,

I recently went through the same task and went with KBOX, receiving the physical KBOX not long after Dell purchased KACE. I compared the KBOX with solutions from Altiris/Symantec, LANDesk, and Kaseya.

When I have a chance, I intended to post an article about the experience, but until then I'd be happy to tell you anything I can about our current KBOX experiences, why I selected them, etc.

Casey

Nice it works

Well just have a quick look at the Heimdal Security Agent, which has just been launched in Denmark by CSIS.

This security tool constantly keeps a selection of actively exploited software patched (the patch is provided by the vendor itself). The entire patching process is silent and unattended. So you just have to press the SCAN button and the patching process is done automatically.

Currently we are monitoring the following list of software which is known for their popularity and as well as being the most vulnerable too according to NVD (National Vulnerability Database):

1. Windows Media Player
2. Internet Explorer
3. MDAC
4. Mozilla Firefox
5. Adobe Reader
6. Adobe Flash player (mozilla plugin)
7. Adobe Flash plugin (ActiveX IE plugin)
8. Adobe Shockwave Player
9. Apple Quicktime
10. Oracle JRE (Java Runtime Environment)
11. Winzip
12. Skype
13. Opera browser

I bet you should have at least 5 of the above software installed on your home PC, with them remained in vulnerable state because you did not find time to download the latest version or is too lazy to download the patch or does not care at all ;=)

In fact, many users ignore the existence of exploits on these programs and are hence left vulnerable to attacks by hackers when they do online banking or other online transactions. Heimdal Agent helps to mitigate this vulnerability risk.

Another feature provided by Heimdal Agent is that you will have the possibility to remove information stealers (i.e. malwares from your machine).
If you want to install this security software, with me as referrer, well it is simple ...

Steps to follow:
--> Go to: https://webbank.csis.dk/
--> username: amu@csis.dk
--> pass: amu
--> Download the Heimdal Agent
--> Install the software
--> Send your feedback to me (help -- send feedback)

Demo of the software: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0v7cLG4QQ


Another option is to download the software from our website itself: https://www.csis.dk/en/private/heimdal

Good news: we are going to monitor Google Chrome, Adobe Air, Real Player, ITune, Safari, Windows live messenger, Other Microsoft products and many more soon...