Blog: Level Platforms

During a level platforms monthly maintenance window, there was a server that decided it wanted to do updates the following week and not the night of the scheduled maintenance.  It appears for some reason it didn’t receive the update policy until after the scheduled time so it set the schedule to the following week.  If you have this problem, the follow procedure worked for me:

  1. Log into the SC.
  2. Go to Patch Management – Settings
  3. Click on Windows Update Agent Policies, and select the appropriate server group.
  4. On the Policy tab, change the Automatic Update option to “Auto download and notify for install”
  5. Log into the server that you are having problems with and run the following command in command prompt:
    • wuauclt.exe /detectnow
    • Windows Server 2008 makes it a little more friendly.  You can just open up the Windows Server Update Service console and click on the “Check for updates” link.

 

Level Platforms has partnered with a company called Ninite to provide prebuilt installers for many non-Microsoft utilities and applications.  These include Java, Adobe Reader, and Adobe Flash.  With the new scripting features in Level Platforms MW2011 we should be able use the packages provided by Ninite to centrally manage updates to these applications.  If you want to try Ninite, they provide free installers packages that are completely functional, but with some restrictions for enterprise automation.

https://ninite.com/help/how-ninite-works/


 

The Level Platforms Service Center website is probably not very standards-compliant.  We've know for some time that Firefox and Chrome browsers don’t render it properly, but I’ve recently seen more critical problems, such as the Site Management page showing a blank site-list in Chrome.  Some of the monitoring procedures require these pages, so using IE (or Firefox add-on like IE Tab) may be the only way to see everything properly.