SecureCentral PatchQuest 4 Patch Mgmt Software

Patch management has become an area of concern for both

SMBs and enterprises, given the crazy number of updates and patches being

continually developed by vendors to improve their solutions. Most network

administrators would know the chaos resulting from the release of a new critical

patch. This process is being partially automated with the help of a new genre of

tools called patch management software. PatchQuest is one such patch management

software for enterprises and SMBs that frees administrators from manually

managing patches for their existing Windows/Linux installations. You can

download its 30-days trail version from AdventNet's website. There's even a

free edition available, which can manage up to 10 computers. This one doesn't

provide any technical support though. The software works on all versions of

Windows starting from NT Server and Workstation to Windows 2003 Server and XP

professional. On the Linux front support is provided for Red Hat and Debian. It

needs a system with P4 1.8 GHz and at least 512 MB RAM. Plus, it needs 10 MB

free hard drive space for installation and at least 10 GB for the database of

patches it will maintain. Turning off the firewall during installation and first

run is recommended to avoid niggles. After that you have to configure the

firewall to allow full access to this application. Once installed, you can

access the application from a Web browser.

The software is limited by domain and workgroup

permissions, which means that you have to edit the permissions to allow full

access control level to the administrator of the Domain before you try to use

the Web Console for patch management. On the home page of the web console you

will find a list of all the latest patches by Microsoft along with their

severity.

However, the product does not automatically detect most of

the network information so you have to provide the information for systems to be

managed manually. We found that after downloading and installing the software

you will have to download the Patch Quest Agent separately from the Web console.

Although there's a link for deploying patches to clients, there's no link to

deploy the agent itself to the clients. It provides different links for

deploying patches and service packs. There are two actions associated with every

patch. The download action simply downloads the patch for later deployment.

Deploy action downloads the patch if it has not been downloaded and then

installs it on a client or the server itself as chosen.

In this page, you can add new clients of your existing Windows or Linux domain which are to be managed by PatchQuest

A good feature in the software is that you can create

groups of systems as well as groups of patches. You can then decide which group

of patches to deploy to which group of systems. The software can send a warning

message to the user about when the patch will be installed, and close any open

applications if a patch installation requires rebooting the machine. You can

also intimate all clients about patch deployments via emails. However, there is

no option for deploying patches for third-party applications, which is a feature

that's available in some other similar products.

Bottom Line: Overall, a

pretty good choice to track patches and updates for the machines on your

network.

Anadi Misra