Patch Manager & HP Business Clients patches - issues?

Question

Hi. We are relatively new to SolarWinds Patch Manager.  We have been successfully deploying patches from Adobe, Sun, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and NotePad++.  I'm now experimenting with the patches under HP Business Clients.  So far, I've had no success.  I've tried publishing some Intel drivers that I think we need, but none of the computers say they need it.  I tried a NVidia driver, but it is failing to install.

Has anyone else had success with using the patches under HP Business Clients?   I find this group of patches challenging because there are so many of them and I don't know which ones are needed.

frgpugs · Answer

So Lawrence was the patch manager god here at solarwinds before he died and I almost always take his advice as gospel when it comes to wsus and PM.  When he says drivers are a bad idea via wsus i just dont even try it.  The general consensus on the internet also agrees with him that drivers via wsus is just a bad idea.  I know that doesnt answer your question but it may help save some time even trying it.

Lawrence (SolarWinds) Mar 19, 2013 at 11:10 AM

+5 ... Drivers via WSUS are a PITA on so many levels.... in addition to the headaches of even finding the right driver (if available) to approve, you also have the practicality that the drivers in MU/WSUS are never the manufacturer's latest drivers. (To get into MU/WSUS, a driver must pass Microsoft WHC testing.)

And, beyond all of that, there's a litany of recent history where the additional size of the updates table caused by those 30000+ drivers now in the MU/WSUS catalog can have significant performance impacts on the operation of the WSUS server, and in some cases are believed to be the root cause of ongoing Timeout issues trying to perform update queries and run reports from the console.