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Preventative maintaince schedule

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by daa-automotive

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Our network consists of 150 clients running a conglamoration of windows 95 and 98. We have both NT and Novell servers on the network. Recently we purchased ZEN works for Novell and have not gotten it totally functional yet. I would like to build a preventative maintaince schedule for all of the clients on the network to ensure that they all have the most currents BIOS and software patches. Does anyone have a solution to this that would make the process somewhat automated?

Thank you in advance

3 replies

by hayden.searle

The best thing I can think of for making the O/S updates a breeze is go to the Windows update site and install update notification (Ithink thats what its called). This will set up task scheduler to look for updates within Microsoft for the O/S. Thismay also be able to be configured to look for updates to any other MS software on the system. I am at this stage unsure whether it can be totally automated to install the updates for you or whether it would still require a manual process of installation.

For the BIOS's the best suggestion there is to see if the M/board manufacturer has an updates mailing list and subscribe yourself. When a patch or update becomes avaliable download it and save it to a shared network drive. Create a std batchfile for login so that it looks for this file when booting and if one is there that it will automatically instal it for you. This may be able to be done through Novell.

I hope this helps

by daa-automotive

While the ideas here do express some helpful ideas I don't think that it can work for me in that way. As with any large corporation we have a myriad of different machines all from Dell which makes the BIOS updates tricky. The batch file will work and is a wonderful idea and is worth looking into. The major thing about what you suggested about doing the auto updates from the MS website is that 99% of my users do not have internet access on their desktops.
Thank you for the effort I do appreciate it.

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