Recently, we have started having alot of actions fail with the message “Waiting on action dependency.” in the summary.
The most recent of these was with MS Update KB287227: 2878227: Description of the Visio 2010 update 2878227 - Visio 2010 SP2
The action for this fixlet is pretty basic, with a file download followed by the execution of the update. I am not seeing anything in the action that could/would be considered a dependency.
Am I missing something?
I would check your relay and server logs to see if there was an error on the server trying to retrieve the file from Microsoft. The link in the fixlet (ID 287822703) does work and grabs the expected file so it seems like it may be a connection issue between the relay and Microsoft.
The relay for both failed end points is the BigFix server. I will check the logs on the server, to see if there were any errors during the communication between Microsoft.
I’m, also, creating a custom copy of the action so I can do some additional testing.
I created a copy of the failing fixlet and re-deployed to the same system it had originally failed on. This time, however, I did not receive the same dependency message. The fixlet failed, but all the steps completed, which leads me to believe it has something to do with the relevancy of the fixlet.
I downloaded the update - using the link from the action - and tried to manually install it. The install halted, stating the update was already installed.
BigFix is still showing this fixlet as applicable on the system that says it is already installed. I have not gone over each piece of the relevancy, which is pretty extensive.
My next step will be to run the relevancy clause on the local system that is reporting as failing using the Fixlet debugger. With that, I may be able to single out the file that is not passing the relevancy check.
For a regular fixlet run as an action to succeed its original targeting relevance must go false otherwise it “fails”
There are 2 ways to address this, one is to make it a Task. Tasks succeed by running every line of the actionscript successfully.
To change a regular fixlet to work like this, look at the Edit/Create fixlet window, on the Actions tab there is an “Include custom success criteria” check mark and if you edit that you can change what “success” means. Be aware that if you put in custom relevance it “succeeds” by that relevance going FALSE
It could be a relevance false-positive (those are pretty frequent) or it could be that one of the patched files was reverted by another product installation.
I’ve had a few cases where I’ve had to copy the original fixlet, and detect the “exit code of action” after the wusa.exe command. If the exit code indicates “already installed”, use wusa to force a remove & reinstall.