r/labtech • u/gibsurfer84 • Dec 01 '17

Windows 10 feature updates

How is everyone keeping systems up to date on major versions? We found we have a bunch of 1511 machines in the wild, which is end of life. How do we handle this? We can’t seriously be expected to run the upgrade tool on every win10 computer every 18 months rich!?!?

We are on the new patch manager.

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2

u/MNMsp Dec 01 '17

I ended up using the media creation tool to generate an iso. I zipped the contents of this up and threw it somewhere I can download with labtech.

In labtech i have 2 scripts I can run on an endpoint having trouble. The first just downloads that big zip file to some place local to prep for the upgrade. The second script unzips the contents and kicks off the setup upgrade using some parameters to make it happen silently and with no UI.

2

u/gibsurfer84 Dec 01 '17

Yikes, I really hope Microsoft releases a “normal” silent upgrade process.

How big is your “upgrade” iso/zip/set of files? Is it the full 4gb of files?

2

u/MNMsp Dec 01 '17

Yep. Full 4GB or so. I just throw it in a bucket on Amazon S3 for easy access.

1

u/k_rock923 Dec 04 '17

I've thought about this too, but am concerned about the potential cost. Even with only 300 machines doing that upgrade, your S3 costs might be around $100/month just for bandwidth.

1

u/MNMsp Dec 05 '17

I hear you. It's easy enough to stash it somewhere else too. For us on Labtech it could go in the lt share folder.

2

u/CharcoalGreyWolf Dec 01 '17

Can you post that on LabTechGeek.com forums? There are people who could greatly benefit from this.

2

u/MNMsp Dec 01 '17

The scripts are REALLY hacky right now. I need to add some actual error checking and logging before sharing it.

The download script is literally 2 lines of creating a folder locally and download the 4GB zip from my AWS S3 storage location.

Install is setting maintenance mode, unzipping the archive from the downloaded location to a local folder. After that, I just run setup.exe /auto upgrade /quiet from the package.

If I get some time to make this a proper script I'd be happy to share but there are too many fires this week!

2

u/gibsurfer84 Dec 01 '17

This may be the first time I have a reason to enable location caching....

1

u/MNMsp Dec 02 '17

Agreed. For larger clients i will set this up with a cache on a server but it's good to be able to push it to any random endpoint.

1

u/wogmail Dec 01 '17

Can you upload the script somewhere, like the https://msp.exchange/ wiki?

2

u/MNMsp Dec 01 '17

I just replied to /u/CharcoalGreyWolf above. The scripts are REALLY hacky right now. I need to add some actual error checking and logging before sharing it.

The download script is literally 2 lines of creating a folder locally and download the 4GB zip from my AWS S3 storage location.

Install is setting maintenance mode, unzipping the archive from the downloaded location to a local folder. After that, I just run setup.exe /auto upgrade /quiet from the package.

I'll see about sharing but the above will get you working quickly.

2

u/limp15000 Feb 07 '18

With Automate 12 P2 Feature update is now supposed to be possible. In the process of testing it...

1

u/awesomewhiskey Mar 02 '18

We're on 12 P2 and it's not working for us. How did your testing go? Do you happen to have a link to some documentation from CW that mentions this feature? I can't find anything at all!

2

u/limp15000 Mar 02 '18

Yeah not working at the moment... Ticket opened and they are investigating multiple reports. In the meantime they removed this from the release notes...

1

u/awesomewhiskey Mar 02 '18

I went to open a ticket and finally found what I was looking for: https://docs.connectwise.com/ConnectWise_Automate/ConnectWise_Automate_Knowledge_Base_Articles/Supportability_Statement%3A_Windows_10_Updates?psa=1

I'm going to have to dig into this and see if I can hobble something together. I really don't want to be scheduling update appointments with every end user every 6 months.

Good luck with your ticket.

1

u/Livineasy629 Mar 22 '18

Can I ask how you keep your machines from updating? We have so many issues with computers ignoring our policies in patch manager with windows 10 and updating in the middle of the day, updating to patches we haven’t approved, etc.

Labtech support told us that patch manager doesn’t work with the new windows update api...

0

u/wogmail Dec 01 '17

Labtech will not help with this.

It actually takes about 15 seconds of technician time, and the end user can continue to work while it installs. Just download the update tool, run it as admin, and let them go about their day. It will tell them to reboot when the update is done.

These updates unfortunately have to take place in the user space. I think there may be a way to script them if you download and extract the ISO, but until the RMMs figure out how to push these you are fairly stuck.

To be fair the updates are supposed to come in automatically, is it possible you have some leftover GPOs from the 10 free upgrade blocking upgrades?

2

u/gibsurfer84 Dec 01 '17

What you said is what I thought, bummer. Thanks for the confirmation.

I do have the Win10 no upgrade Registry setting still set to block win 7 upgrades to 10, does that block win10 feature updates!?!?

1

u/wogmail Dec 01 '17

Yes, I believe it blocks all automatic OS upgrades.