Hello everyone,

The Cisco Webex patch with Patch ID 313977 was released on Apr-28-2020 at 04:40 pm GMT. Regrettably, on installing this patch in certain machines, few of our customers got in touch with us stating a few issues. Following this, the patch was removed from the Desktop Central repository on the morning of Apr-29-2020, for further analysis of the situation.

Issue when deploying Cisco Webex patch:

Customers who have synced the database and deployed the Cisco Webex patch in the following window (Apr-28-2020, 04:40 pm GMT to Apr-29-2020, 5:46 am GMT), might face certain issues with respect to file deletion. 

Cause of this issue:

Installing Cisco Webex patch, requires special handling as the Webex Installer's upgrade process uninstalls the old version and installs the new version. This process may sometimes fail after uninstalling the old version thereby completely removing the Webex application from the machine. Our pre-req handler is equipped to re-initiate the process if it fails and has a module that deletes the downloaded files after successful installation. However, during a recent change in our pre-req handler, a memory handling error occurred which led to improper assigning of files to be deleted. This in turn led to the deletion of files in the C drive of some machines on which the patch was installed. Since this issue was due to improper memory handling, it was not reproduced in our testing environment. 

Steps to tackle the issue:

1. Initiate the Patch DB sync, if it has not been done after the window mentioned earlier (Apr-28-2020, 04:40 pm GMT to Apr-29-2020, 5:46 am GMT). This is to ensure that the Cisco Webex patch gets removed from the existing lists. 


2. If you have an on-going deployment task with respect to this patch, suspend the task immediately.


3. Find the list of machines on which this patch has been installed by running a query. Navigate to Reports --> Query Reports --> New Query Report --> Run the following query: select r.name, ip.remarks from installpatchstatus ip inner join resource r on r.resource_id = ip.resource_id where patch_id= 313977.


4. Once these machines have been identified, check their status. Not all machines are affected by this patch. However, we could find that certain machines had some files deleted in the C drive and a few of them might have their OS corrupted.

Plans to overcome such issues:

On behalf of ManageEngine, we sincerely regret the inconvenience that this issue has caused and thank our customers for being understanding and patient as we worked towards fixing the problem. To prevent such issues in the future, we have planned on expanding our testing environment setup and undertaking extensive testing on multiple platforms. For further assistance with this, feel free to contact our Support team at desktopcentral-support@manageengine.com

Cheers, 

The ManageEngine Team