Pushing Patches Across a Wide Area Windows Network?

meridian-gh asks: "Microsoft is releasing new patches and updates for their products continually. For those of us who have to deal with large, geographically diverse windows-based networks, managing patches can be a nightmare. You cannot trust the users to do it. Tools such as SMS and HFNetCHK Pro are neat, but incredibly expensive. Most free programs I have seen don't support Windows 98, which many of us are forced to deal with. My question is, how do you deal with the remote deployment of patches in a efficient (and cheap) manner?"

Comments

Batch Scripts

[LWolenczak]

Most people I know, and I personally have used batch scripts. Honestly, I've looked at using bash scripts to provide a more powerful scripting language for pushing patches from servers to workstations.

Startup Scripts

[karearea]

For our Windows 2000 workstations and Laptops we use the startup scripts to install applications and patches.
We have an unattended install for the laptops, when they reboot they are part of the domain and the startup scripts apply. They then run through (without user intervention) do an unattended install of office 97 and outlook 2000, apply several registry patches, update templates and W2k service packs.
Each time a laptop or a workstation starts up on the network the startup scripts run and check for updates. We use KiXtart to check version and apply patches etc.
Of course there are some apps that cause problems, but anything can be hacked (copy, move files, registry patches etc) in some form to do what you want it to.

the place i work for apparently does this:

[XO]

Each location has a Xenix based server, with anywhere from 2 to 20 or so Windows '95-'98 clients (each of the Windows boxes are identically configured). The Xenix based server occasionally communicates with the home office, and downloads updates.

Each Windows machine has it's own FTPd running on it, and when there's an update, the Xenix machine ftp's the update to the Windows box, gives it an autoexec.bat that will make the update happen, then forces the machine to reboot.