Habitat 3rd Party Application Management

[Cubert]

I notice repo version is saying none on mine. How do I set the repo version?

Capture.PNG

Have you enabled any clients yet and have they scanned? Until you have 1 agent out there scanning for packages for it's self you will not be grabbing the data from the repo and so we have not yet received any version info.

Enable a client and allow 24 to 48 hours for all the first check ins take place then review data again. versions should show up.

Also to shorten the time it takes change the speed from Turtle to Rabbit. Then should get data in 24 hrs.

See if that fixes your issue

[jeffdoggendorf]

Thanks for all the hard work on this tool! I have read over the forums but am not seeing this anywhere. Will there eventually be a way to exclude individual applications at the location level? Example - Client A wants all third party applications updated. Client B wants everything except JAVA updated. I see the EDF at the location level but it looks to be an "all or nothing" block.

[Cubert]

Everything in Habitat can be massaged and added to, one of the great things about this tool box is that it is driven by the needs of our users.

An example of this is in our latest build where a user sent us a email with a need and the basics of how he saw it working within the plugin. Our team picked that up and with in just a week had a first generation built and being tested.

So absolutely we can modify the behavior.

You would like to see the App update manager have an ability to exclude individual software updates for a given agent or location.

Let us look into this and see where we can make changes to allow this function.

[Cubert]

Well that was pretty painless!

No this just might be the fastest request to development we had in quite awhile. The last one took a whole week to get together.

Capture.PNG (40.8 KiB) Viewed 4392 times

In next build (1.0.0.74) just right click an agent from list ad you can enable or disable Auto updates.

I am working on adding in, being able to select an installed application from list and to disable just that one software allowing any others to update as normal.

[Cubert]

By Joe, I think we got it!

We now have 4 layers of excludes in the App manager.

Capture.PNG (82.98 KiB) Viewed 4388 times

• Disable the App Search for items in main view

• Disable the entire location via EDF at location level

• Disable an agent from all updates

• Disable a single Application for an agent.

This will be available in build (1.0.0.74) due out soon. Monitor main Habitat forums for build release announcements. This will need a few days in the cooker to make sure no adverse effects on RMM.

[Cubert]

New in Habitat 1.0.0.75

Appmanager1.PNG (43.64 KiB) Viewed 3828 times

AppmanagerClientConsole.PNG (65.09 KiB) Viewed 3828 times

New in App Manager is the new Snail Mode feature and the schedule delay feature.



The Snail Mode allows you to further slow the automation for updating applications on a per client bases. Each client is independent of another and allows you to schedule updates on a give day of the week or day of the month. By default the daily schedule applies to all clients.

The Delay Schedule places a (x) minute delay between scheduled agents updates. This allows you to control how long of a delay between agents running automation script. This is per client so all clients running daily will run at same time by pass down delays to agents equally.


We also added an update loop sleeper function to the automation script that forces a 60 second wait every 5 updates that it attempts. This helps to keep agent from causing an update Chocolatey repo lockout.

We added 3 ways to assist in timing and scheduling of Chocolatey update which should improve issues with public repo timeouts.

[Cubert]

Also We added in to the Automation Updates a sub function that looks for known versioning issues and provides a work around to check versions against repos.


Example: Adobe Acrobat Reader DC

When querying chocolatey for installed version it provides a 2 digit year and not a 4 digit year and thus fails the version check against repo which uses a 4 digit year.

Agent reports version = 21.123.456.78900
Repo reports version = 2021.123.456.78900

Same version but it fails due to how repo reports version. When the script see the application Adobe Acrobat DC it will retest version after chopping off the first 2 digits thus comparing apples to apples.

As we find more apps with version issues we will add to the function.