I have tried to make sense of all the restart options and I'm still having difficulty. Since the restart options are very limited for deploying applications (i.e. no suppress restart options) we are looking at the Maintenance Windows option. However, I have not been able to find out what happens if the Maintenance Window is missed consistently (if the computer is shutdown or whatever). I know the most common answer is use WOL to boot the computer, but we have 5,000+ computers and so far very few of them have WOL configured and our area techs are somewhat hesitant to depend on it anyway. Basically we need a way to install apps/packages/updates whenever the computer is powered on, but not have the computer restart. We then either need the computer to be allowed to be shutdown by the user at the end of the day or reboot it outside of business hours.
We have had some success with the software updates using the suppress option, at least in keeping users happy that there computers aren't going to immediately restart. However, I can't find information on when what happens next - the 2 machines I tested it on seemed to reboot themselves after about 2 days, but they did it during business hours so that would have been bad if it had been regular machines. Can someone shed some light on the issue for me and give me some ideas on how to least impact our users? They tend to get freaked out with unknown balloon tips and reboot prompts. Thanks again.
Über Random
