Intel Advisory

With Intel announcing a whole bunch of vulnerabilities yesterday I was wondering. Once Dell releases a firmware update to patch it, is it possible for SPM to,

a. Deploy a Dell firmware patch?

b. Target machines by model?

Thanks and Happy Thanksgiving.

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Accepted answers

kellytice

There are Dell catalogs available that contain firmware updates. Assuming Dell releases a new one and puts it in their catalog, you can sync that down to Patch Manager and (optionally) publish it into WSUS or SCCM for deployment.

A consideration that might not be super obvious:

I believe that the Dell packages use some WMI extensions provided by the Dell OpenManage agent to determine applicability. If the target machines don't have that software, the applicability rule will likely evaluate as 'false' and therefore come back as "Not Applicable".

In terms of targeting by model...that may be possible. For example if i go into the All Computers view under my WSUS server in the Patch Manager console, two of the available columns there are "make" and "model". You could sort or group by those columns and then select the particular machines you want to target. If you right-click that selection and use an Update Management task you can deploy a particular firmware update to that selection of machines.
In theory, the packages that Dell makes should have some pretty specific applicability rules built into them...so it might not be required to be that specific in the machines that you target since the rules should exclude those machines for which the rules don't evaluate as True... but it sounds like you are like me and would rather play it safe by targeting just he models that you think should get it.

All comments

kellytice

A consideration that might not be super obvious:

zdavid

Thanks! I found the site to download the catalog from, once they release it, but it is password protected. Will need to contact our Dell rep about access

kellytice

Patch Manager should be able to hook into the Dell catalogs directly. In SPM, go into Administration and Reporting -> Software Publishing -> [right-click and select Synchronization Settings] -> Subscription tab and there should be two catalogs there - one for Dell workstations and one for Dell Servers. The items in those catalogs are likely unchecked by default.

You'll probably also want to make sure that you have a recurring synchronization of those catalogs configured (on the first tab of that same wizard); you can optionally set up that sync to notify you when there are new packages (for any of the catalogs) available.

zdavid

Unfortunately, I don't seem to have Dell listed as an option in the subscription tab. It may only appear once I import it once into the system.