Issue with Poedit Applicability – September 2024
On Sept. 11, 2024 Patch My PC Published the Poedit application with overly generic WSUS applicability rules. This would lead to this update being applicable on devices where the update was not installed.
Topics covered in this article:
Determine if You are Affected
Customers may be affected by this issue if all of the following are true:
- The product Poedit (EXE) is selected and synced as a WSUS Update in the Patch My PC Publisher, SCUP or ConfigMgr In-Console updates
- This issue does not affect ConfigMgr Apps in the Publisher or Intune Apps or Updates from the Publisher or Cloud
- A sync occured between Sept 11, 2024 at 10:01AM PST and Sept 12, 2024 at 6:25AM PST
- The Poedit (EXE) update was deployed to endpoints
Customers where all of the the above are true may have found that the Poedit application installed on targeted systems where the Operating System was Windows 10 or later, this includes server OSes where the major OS version is 10 or greater. Patch My PC estimates that this issue affects less than 1% of our customers based on the telemetry available and will contact potentially affected customers directly in the coming weeks.
Enhance/Improve validation processes within the engineering team for all rule changes related to existing updates.Issue Outline
On Sept. 11, 2024 at 2:20AM PST the Patch My PC catalog team was made aware of a change to the Poedit application where the application now required Windows 10 or greater. The team modified the existing update, and Patch My PC published this update on Sept. 11 at 10:01AM PST. The update passed Patch My PCs tests, as it installed properly on the test device.
On Sept 12, 2024 at 3:08AM PST, a customer contacted Patch My PC Support stating that the update for Poedit was installing on devices where Poedit did not previously exist. The Patch My PC support team identified the issue and alerted the Catalog Team at 3:55AM PST. At this time Patch My PC found that the Operating System rule that was added was mistakenly added within an OR condition instead of an AND condition. This made the update applicable on any devices with an Operating System of Windows 10 or later. The Catalog Team then fixed and tested the new rules.
Poedit rules with incorrectly added Windows 10 requirement.
On Sept. 12, 2024 at 6:25AM PST, Patch My PC published the fixed rules to the catalog. Any customers that had synced with the incorrect rules after this time will get the new fixed rules on their next sync.
Looking forward
After this issue, Patch My PC is making the following changes:
- Improve the validation processes within the engineering team for all rule changes related to existing updates
- Add additional testing to flag overly generic applicability rules before they are published
- Improve telemetry so that Patch My PC can contact customers directly if there are issues with specific products or updates in the catalog
Cleanup
Remediation for this issue consists of uninstalling the software from affected endpoints. There are multiple methods to perform this uninstallation.
Uninstall Script
Patch My PC has a generalized uninstalltion script that can be used to remediate this issue. The script can be found here: Patch My PC Uninstallation Script
To uninstall the affected software with the script above, run the script with the following arguments:
-DisplayName Poedit -Architecture x64 -EnforcedArguments “/VERYSILENT /NORESTART”
Patch My PC Application Deployment
Additionally, Customers on an Enterprise Plus or higher license can enable the Poedit (EXE) application under “ConfigMgr Apps” in the Patch My PC publisher, then create an uninstallation deployment to the affected endpoints.