Reboots Occurring from Altiris Widespread

Products

• Client Management Suite
• Patch Management Solution
• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

Seeing widespread reboots within the environment after enabling patches.  Patch reboots are not scheduled until after hours but reboots are occurring during non-scheduled hours.

 

Environment

Release: 8.x

Cause

In this case, after reviewing the logs from several computers that installed updates and rebooted during the business day, we found entries that referenced AexPatchUtil.exe with entries such as:

exPatchUtil: Starting AexPatchUtil.exe  /Xa /q (command line switches used to start SW update cycle)

AeXPatchUtil: StartSoftwareUpdateCycle() 

AexPatchUtil: Starting AexPatchUtil.exe  /reboot /q (Reboot only if required and run in quiet mode)

AeXPatchUtil: Requesting a reboot Software Update Plug-in reboot. A reboot will only occur if it is required

Resolution

Tracked down a script task used to run the SW update cycle for computers in a dynamic filter used for computers that are behind a specified number of days since the update release date. 

Deleted the schedule set in the task, which was set to run every six hours.