Is there a way to specify to the fixlet that we are not running the IBM or Trend installations for the various components? Currently, when we push a relay or client or console upgrade, it will push 3 times as much data (for the regular install, the IBM install and the Trend install). We asked support about removing those entries and only using the regular installer but support said that would be unsupported.
Actually your agents/relays will only ever download one version of these files because they are smart enough to only get the version they need so you shouldn’t have an issue here… (but it is true that the server will cache a copy of the files… but note the files will get kicked out of the cache quickly because they won’t be used).
Unfortunately, not at this time. When version 7.1 is the lowest supported platform, we will be able to craft the action to prevent the unnecessary files from flowing to the relays.
Also, while a custom upgrade Fixlet might not be “officially” supported, it’s pretty low risk to replace:
if {exists key “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix\Brand” whose (exists value “value” whose (it as string = “Trend”) of it) of registry}
Actually, once a client below the relay requests a single download that is listed in the action, the relay will download all files listed in the action.
In most cases this is an optimization based on the theory that if one client below the relay is requesting one of the files, it is likely a different client will request one of the other files. So the relay will preemptively download them all. However in this particular case clients will never request any of the other downloads so the optimization actually behaves sub-optimally.
Remember in all cases clients will only download the files they need.
We noticed that too. The fixlet to upgrade the BES Installation Folders will download three times 145 MB file instead of just once. What a waste of Internet bandwidth and disk space.
Assuming that branded (partners) installations are relatively small number, what was the reason to not creating a separate upgrade fixlet only for the branded deployments?
Hopefully this will change when BigFix get the need to support more partner deployments in addition to Trend and IBM
We discussed this issue in detail internally before we arrived at the combined solution… The positives of keeping them together are fewer Fixlets (less clutter) and simpler user experience for all of our users. The negative is that your server will download/cache 2 unnecessary files temporarily (the files will get kicked out of the cache soon) and any relay that downloads these files will also cache the two files (if a relay is involved, which I don’t think will be the case in most deployments).
From the discussion, it sounds like there is a definite annoyance about these files and we can consider changing it… but does the fact that only one agent that is usually on the BigFix Server will likely ever need this file (and thus no relay will download the file…) change anyone’s mind about how important this is (so basically it is not going to cause any significant bandwidth usage other than a one-time download.
we have about 450 relays in our organization pulling the 3 relay updates, 6 server installs and 3 agents across our QOSd wan. These are chained relays up to 6 deep. If the relays have to pull all three versions of the files and then they get kicked out of the relay, will the next run of upgrades not cause it to repull the files a second time?