Sometimes trying to stay bleeding edge is tough – today’s example is when you want to install updates through SCCM a day or two after Patch Tuesday, particularly using Maintenance Windows to allow restarts within a specific time frame.
We use automatic deployment rules to update a Software Update Group every Patch Tuesday – scheduling this is easy because its always the second Tuesday of a month.
But I want the updates to install on Wednesday night, or Thursday morning. This ensures strict compliance requirements can be met, but allows 24 hours for testing. Can’t just schedule the install and restarts for “second Wednesday of the month” though, because if the first of the month is a Wednesday (like this month) then our actual install date happens to be the THIRD Wednesday of the month.
Previously we solved this by manually updating Maintenance Window schedules every month, painstaking selecting the right date and hoping we didn’t mess it up.
PowerShell took that risk away:
SCCM_UpdateMaintenanceWindowSchedule.ps1 – on GitHub
See the comments on the script for details of how it works. As a very brief overview:
I found Tim Curwick’s method of calculating Patch Tuesday, and used that in my script to reliably calculate my Wednesday or Thursday install date.
This script runs as System from an SCCM server on the 1st of every month. It performs the calculation, updates maintenance windows on specific Collections, and outputs a log to file and emails results.
