Scripting

Hello all,

This is my first time posting here, so apologies ahead of time if I'm violating any sort of rules. Just let me know if so! Before I ask my question, I will also say that I tried searching through ITNinja but didn't find anything that quite matched my use case.

In any case, I am trying to utilize task chains for system maintenance activities that we perform on our IT Spare devices and on user-assigned devices when we have them in for maintenance. My idea right now is to have a task chain run against the spares every few hours, and I have a smart device label which contains any devices fitting our naming format for spares. For user-assigned devices, I was thinking IT staff would add the device into the task chain as needed and run the task chain on the fly, without any sort of associated schedule.

The tasks we want to ensure get done, and that we are trying to automate, are below:

KScript ensuring windows 10 is properly licensed w/an Enterprise KMS key

KScript ensuring unnecessary Windows store apps get removed

KScript ensuring an old, unnecessary VPN client gets removed

KScript ensuring Adobe Acrobat is properly licensed

Trigger Managed Installations for the device, installing any managed installs appropriate to its assigned device label

Run a detect & deploy patch schedule

Run a Windows Feature update schedule

Run a detect & deploy patch schedule

We've found running a patch schedule prior to a windows feature update schedule is necessary from that list of steps because, from what we've observed, the Windows feature update may or may not be successful if the system is not fully up to date. We run a patch schedule post-update to ensure the system gets any new updates relevant to the new Windows 10 feature update version.

When running this against a set of test machines, the results seem to be intermittent at best. Some of the machines finish without issue. Others get stuck when running the first patch schedule. The machines that finish and the machines that get stuck at the patch schedule step seem to be consistent. Has anyone else out there tried to do anything similar, or have recommendations on some things I can check? I just figured I'd ask.