Have you been struggling to keep Java up to date? What about removing old, vulnerable versions? This has been a big pain for us, but I am pleased to announce our new 2016 Java Install/Update script for Kaseya.
We have spent over 150 hours struggling to deal with this issue. The old installers we had didn’t remove old versions, and Java has changed the way they install, not automatically removing the old version, before installing the new one. When you do this manually, they send you to a website that allows you to run their utility to remove old versions, but this utility is not available (that we have seen) for us to download and run silently. We have also run into a few times where updates to Java were released as a patch, and the patch was dependent on a specific version to already be installed. This was not possible to keep track of with our standard installer.
Kyle, our script guru, had to go back to drawing board, and re-invent this process, and the result is a pretty cool script.
This script depends almost completely on a complex VBS script that Kyle wrote. It starts by walking through the registry and finding all versions that are installed. It then grabs the uninstall string and begins to loop through each one to uninstall it, while leaving the latest one in place. When finished, it makes sure that both the 32 and 64-bit versions of the latest version are installed, and writes results to the Agent Procedure log. As I write this out, it sounds like should simple, but it has been far from it, with Java throwing us curve balls at every chance like a bug in the recent Java installer, which is looking for the 32-bit MSI files in the wrong directory, so Kyle is now creating a virtual link between those two directories so it can be found.
We suggest you do the following:
- Use our “Sun Java Audit” script to audit all your machines.
- Go to Info Center and create a report that shows you the results. (This is a Legacy report, Log report, and you are looking for the $audit$ tag or $java$ tag).
- Schedule the “2016 Java Install/Update” script to run once a week, preferable after hours.
- Schedule the Sun Java Audit to run the next day.
- Schedule the Info Center report to run after that, and set it to email you directly. You can then scan through the results and make sure it is working.
If you are a Go!Manage or VA hosted partner, these files are already on your servers. We suggest that you look through your previously scheduled Java scripts and templates and remove and reschedule any scripts that begin with “OLD”. If you are a VA SaaS, or ClubMSP member, you can download these scripts from our ClubMSP site (membership and login required).
Hopefully by following this process, you will be able to keep on top of this important update. If you have any problems, or suggestions for improvement, please leave us comments below. Our next release of this will include better tagging and reporting.
