User-defined Exclude ?

[Mark T.]

Hi Matthew.

This is a feature suggestion. In time, I've assembled a list of crap updates from MS.

While Ancile removes many of them, it would be nice if users were allowed to create their own user-defined excludes list.

For instance, WSUS Offline Update has an ExcludeList.txt file which, if present will ignore all KB's therein.

I know I can edit data\uninstall_Updates\uninstall_Other.lst, but I'd rather not play with your code.

PS: If this function is already built-in, then I'd like to know how to use it.

Thanks. Mark

[Matthew Linton]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for your interest in Ancile. I was looking through the WSUS Offline Update configuration files, and I think I have a solution for you. The Ancile config files are formatted:

[KBID]<TAB><TAB>[Description]

But the only thing Ancile cares about is the KBID part. The description is just to document why the update was added to the list.

If you were to modify the WSUS Offline Update configuration files by removing the "KB" prefix, you could just drop those files in the "data/uninstall_Updates/" directory and Ancile will parse them and should have no problem removing the updates listed.

The only thing Ancile may have issues processing is the entries that begin with "ndp". The powershell script is written to only use KBIDs to remove updates. However, the worst that will happen is Ancile will throw an error that there isn't an update that matches, and should continue without any other issues.

Let me know how that works for you

[Mark T.]

Hi Matt. Thanks for your reply.

I've done exactly as you suggest actually :

I put all the unwanted KB numbers (without "kb" prefix) in data\uninstall_Updates\uninstall_Other.lst, making sure no numbers from the other .LST files were duplicated.

I hesitated to do so at first, because I thought Ancile might supersede the file (ie. file would be automatically regenerated at each run). But it works like a charm.

What would be way cool is if these lists would get more frequent updates than the Ancile releases themselves. Not sure where you get your KB blacklist(s).

Maybe something to consider for a future release?

Keep up the good work!

Mark/x13