Jul/092
Windows Update monitoring with Xymon
Xymon is a pretty cool and free system and network monitoring solution. Some of you may know it as Hobbitmon as it recently was forced to change it's name because of some lawsuit I guess.
For those of you who haven't heard of it before check it out over at http://hobbitmon.sourceforge.net/. We use it currently at RIT to monitor a few hundred systems ranging from Windows to VMWare and Solaris. It basically does it all.
Using the BBWin client over at http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/ we are able to monitor anything and everything that you can script in Windows. Whether it be monitoring drive and memory usage right on down to parsing log files for specific events...if you can script it, it can be monitored.
What I ended up doing was writing a VBScript that would be executed by BBWin and would then use the Windows Update API built into windows to check and then create a report about critical patches not being installed or active (the patch installed but system not rebooted).
You can download the script on my Google Code at http://code.google.com/p/mstaint/. Installation instructions are included in the zip file download.
Drop me an email if you have a feature request for something you would like to see added to it.
Enjoy.
October 15th, 2009
This is a great script — very nice work and very handy to check that after a patch run something wasn’t overlooked!
One thing though, we have a couple of servers that change to condition ‘purple’ after vary amounts of time.. any ideas? How often is the script run, or is that best to be set in the bbwin.cfg file?
Thanks for the script and your time!
October 19th, 2009
Has the script changed back to green or yellow after an amount of time or did it continue to stay purple?
The purple condition means that there has been no update from the script in a certain period of time. This can be caused by a number of things..but mainly that the script is either taking to long to run or that the script is hanging.
One of the troubleshooting task I use is to open up a command prompt and cd into the BBWin/bin directory. From there I manually run a script via “cscript //nologo winUpdates.vbs” and watch the output. That will usually key you in as to the problem.
Let me know what you com up with!