Donald
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An error occurred while saving the comment An error occurred while saving the comment Donald
commented
This can be run through the scripting module to adjust the scheduled time for defragmentation based on the contents of C:\maintenance\maintenance.txt. The script can simply run at a reasonable interval to check for user updates to the file.
An error occurred while saving the comment Donald
commented
“%SystemRoot%\system32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\powershell.exe” with params “-WindowStyle Hidden -nologo -noninteractive $time = Get-Content c:\maintenance\maintenance.txt; if ($time) {schtasks /Change /TN ”\Microsoft\Windows\Defrag\ScheduledDefrag“ /ST $time}”
An error occurred while saving the comment Donald
commented
This will likely be cleaner using scripts to remove or add scheduled tasks in task scheduler at the specified time based on the presence of the named file. However, it would still be nice to provide the user with a GUI and a published list of tasks they can schedule at certain times.
An error occurred while saving the comment Donald
commented
Currently I am designing some KACE tasks to do this that will read a user edited file to get a preferred time for maintenance. This should be especially worthwhile for laptops, since they are difficult to get online at a known time when the user is not working.
While there are probably some tweaks I will discover while writing the scripts that make the process much smoother, the general idea at the moment is that the machine's owner will be allowed to change the name or contents of a file to specific values to tell us when the machine will be available for maintenance tasks. A script will run from the KACE every few hours to read this file and appropriately populate a custom registry key on the machine with a time. If the file does not exist, the key could be generated and populated with a default time, or a warning could be sent to the administrator noting it is not configured if the machine is sensitive such that it should not be arbitrarily done off-schedule, such as to protect servers. The key will be inventoried as a software item such that we can generate a machine label based on the contents of the registry key. The machine label can be used to apply to maintenance tasks scheduled to run at specific times. This should allow us to schedule, for instance, disk defragmentation or patching, on laptops at a time when we know the machine will be on and connected, but the user will not require use of the machine. Rather than guessing when the user will go to lunch, or whether they will connect their laptop to our VPN at 2200 before they go to bed, we will allow them to provide a specific time for maintenance, which they can change generally at their leisure rather than asking us to change it.
I believe a very small client-side application that would allow the administrator to push specific scripts to a list, and allow the user to just set a time next to them for the KACE to use for a schedule would be relatively easy to write, and solve a huge portion of the problem for scheduling maintenance tasks, especially for laptop users where it is difficult to schedule available times. It also passes more control to the user, which is typically recieved favorably.
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1 voteDonald
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This can be run through the scripting module to adjust the scheduled time for defragmentation based on the contents of C:\maintenance\maintenance.txt. The script can simply run at a reasonable interval to check for user updates to the file.