General Maintenance Via JAMF

[roethelbc]

Hey all,

Recently we have been toying with the idea of doing weekly "maintenance" work on the computers in our environment. This would involve forcing software updates (Especially the security updates) as well as app updates like (Flash, Java, etc) But would also include stuff like running permission repairs and possibly stuff with flushing caches.

So the question is, what is everyone doing in there environments in this way? How often? etc etc etc.

Thanks all

[CasperSally]

We patch browsers, java, flash once a month. I stage them to technicians first, then sample group of users, then everyone, so it takes 2-3 weeks to just get them out the door.

Any critical security updates (NTP, bash fix) that are small enough to send out, we do as soon as we can. Point updates to OS, which contain majority of security updates, are just too big for our environment to push out. We reimage everything to latest OS once a year.

Edit - forgot java comes out quarterly, so we do that quarterly, not monthly.

[jennifer]

I'm a big fan of putting those maintenance items in Self Service. I've got a 'First Aid' category whose policies include repairing permissions, flushing system caches, things like that.

Adrina Kelly did a great presentation at JNUC 2013, "Getting Users to Do Your Job (Without Them Knowing It)" that shows how to set this up as well as some more advanced features, like having users send you log files.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzlWdrRc1rY&index=15&list=PLlxHm_Px-Ie01lK6FgfdXhk-YuByY6X27

Also, security updates go out via policy, usually once a month over a weekend (or whenever your users aren't there). Emergency patches are done on a case by case basis.