Scheduled Task via Group Policy - Not sure if it's working

[Justin Chalfant]

Did you give All Computers read and execute permissions to the share?

OK.  Some more info.

No matter what we do, we can't get it to run as System, from a network drive.  Maybe it's a permissions thing or something.  No idea.

So, as a work around, I modified my GPO to now copy the patchmypc.exe, patchmypc.ini, defailtapps.settings, and patchmypc.settings files to the local C drive.  The Scheduled Task then runs it from that location.  This work.  Everything runs and the software gets updated.

However, this doesn't seem to work when told to use the Cache folder out on our network.  The log shows that it downloaded the updates from the internet instead of pulling them from the cache.

When I ran the program manually, it does have the path to the cache folder listed in options but it just seemed to ignore that settings.

Ideally what I'd like to happen is this:

• PC runs PMP.exe /s based on the scheduled task.
  If it finds something out of date, it will look to our network share to see if the file it needs is already out there.  If it finds it, it will install the update.
  If it looks to the network share but doesn't find what it needs, I want it to go online and download the file and then put the installer into the cache folder for the next person.

Maybe it just can't do what we want and we'll jsut deal with having everyone have to download the files every time but just thought I'd check back in.

[Kelemvor]

We had tried giving explicit permissions to the folder but it didn't help.  So, we decided to just make the GPO as a User GPO so it will run as the user logged in.  That seems to be working fine.

The one problem we're having now is that we modified the .settings file to force the Log file to go into a folder on each person's C drive.  However, when someone runs the program with the /s flag, the First time it doesn't put the log file where we told it to.  Then if they run it again, the Second time it does put the log file where we specified.  I don't know if it's reading in the settings and running the scan at the same time so the settings don't take effect the first run or if it's a bug or what.

We're going to try running it the first time in Download Only mode to see if that works, and then run it the second time in regular mode so we can capture what each machine is doing.

[Justin Chalfant]

The .settings file isn't supported in V4.0. We moved to PatchMyPC.ini this can store things in the options menu and any new selected apps. We wanted to merge the 2 old options into a single settings file. The log file location isn't something that is currently saved into the settings file though. You could try to set the path directly in the regsitry: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Patch My PC\Options\LogPath:YourPath. For larger businesses using GPO/Domains our SCUP Catalog solution for SCCM will be a better option.

[aminou]

Thanks for the response.  If you think to reply here when the new version is out, that'd be great.  I'll give it a try right away.

You could try the latest beta if you want

[Mahirasharma]

Great Information was very useful for me..