Patches Uninstall on patch bundle unassign - by design?

Question

Hi,
Recently we began testing ZCM 10.3.3 for deploying Microsoft patches to our Windows XP desktops. We have come across
a situation that whilst after some investigation looks like it might be operating as designed, we think is perhaps
the result of an over sight in how the product works. I thought I would post the scenario here to see if anyone else
had come across this and if so, what your thoughts on it might be. I am tempted to log a SR, but this might be a well
known occurrence?
Essentially what happened was that we created a patch bundle and assigned it to a device group that contained test
machines. The patch deployment went as expected with no issues observed or reported. A week later I removed the
relationship between the patch bundle and the test device group. Immediately (on next device refresh) the machines in
the test device group began to uninstall the patches in the patch bundle that had just been "unassigned". In
addition, interactive "remediate.exe" errors were thrown in any active user sessions on those machines. The errors
seemed to be related to patches that werent technically able to be uninstalled anyway.
Initially we were a little stumped by this as the ZPM patch bundle was not enabled for Uninstall, however looking at
the bundle a little closer we noticed that the actual individual patch bundles being referenced in the install action
DID have Uninstall enabled - if fact it appeared that every patch was enabled for uninstall - even those that werent
technically able to be uninstalled.
When considering this in conjunction with our global ZEnworks Explorer Configuration to Uninstall unassigned bundles
after 0 days, things started to make a little more sense - but I'm not sure this is how it should actually work.
To make a long story short, I personally dont think that the global Zenworks Explorer Configuration to uninstall
unassigned bundles after a certain amount of days should apply to patch bundles, or at least patch bundles should be
able to be excluded from this. We have this setting set to 0 days so that when we unassign licensed applications,
they are immediately removed from the desktops they have been deployed to - this is to ensure we are confident of our
licensing position in terms of how many copies of a application we may be licensed for and how many we actually have
installed in our fleet.
The implication of this situation is that for us, every time we deploy a patch, we need to maintain the assignment between
the patch and the device. On the face of it, this doesnt seem like a viable long term solution for a whole host of
reasons.
So out of this I have a couple of questions:
1. Has anyone else come across this, and if so, a) do you think this is a reasonable way for the product to be
operating, and b) how have you worked with (or around) it.
2. Is it possible to disable uninstall for the individual patch bundles that ZPM creates, or will ZPM simply "fix"
them?
I'd be very interested in peoples thoughts on this.
Cheers,

Answer 1

Hi Shaun,
Thanks for the reply. Yes, the "Ignore chained dependencies" box is checked on the individual patch bundles and "uninstall" is disabled for the parent patch bundle itself. Do you think this sounds like a bug? If thats the case, I'll definitely open an SR for it.
Cheers,