As the Enterprise LANDesk Administrator of a large company that has had over 15 Core Servers with over 12,000 systems and over 20 other LANDesk tech's to support I have found "how should I patch" to come up often at my location as well as on this forum.
Like Windows, there are 3 or more ways to do most anything in LANDesk, patching being one of those, and I have re-written the way I advocate our techs patch in LANDesk from the way I recommended a few years back and thought I would post it here for other to use as needed. It is not the only way, nor am I saying it is the best way.
Please keep in mind that this is a basic method, simple and effective. I did not go into Auto-Fix, some of our advanced tech's use it, others don't. I wanted something a newbie could pickup, read and begin patching in a very short amount of time.
Picking what patches to patch can be a political nightmare depending on your companies polices. Ours went from 12 groups doing it all differently, some patching critical's only, some not patching, others patching everything possible to a reduced number of groups that all now have a "baseline" that is set from up above that is pretty in-depth and aggressive deadlines to have them patched by.
In short, we patch all security related items with few exceptions that are patchable via LANDesk and we do it aggressivley as you must now days in this world of exploits.
If you are not patching, I strongly suggest you start.
Attached is the method I recommend, it uses two tasks, one a "Push" the other a straight "Policy". Why not a "Policy Support Push" you ask? We were doing that but are finding that some systems will stick in the "active" bin of the scheduled tasks for some reason (being researched) and thus the task will not become a policy. If you restart the task, some of those systems will clear, but then others will stick... and so on.
It goes over creating a group of patches, creating the tasks, targeting the systems and scheduling the deployment.
I look forward to your feedback and I hope this helps some of you.
