How to determine which systems receive a patch

How to determine which systems receive a patch

How can you determine which systems are receiving the patches? Let's say you deploy a patch to 100 systems.

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It depends on what patch management application you are using in your organization. A lot of the tools on the market have built-in monitoring and reporting capabilities. Look at Microsoft Systems Management Server (SMS) for one example of this. If you are manually distributing patches (i.e., by hand, through GPO or some other method like that), you'll need to develop some sort of homegrown solution. The patch installations write information to the registry, to a log file in the %win% directory and also to the Event Viewer. You would need to develop a script or other mechanism to pull the information from one of these locations.

This was first published in July 2004

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