“Systems still report “Pending Restart” even though they have (already) restarted by an action. This is a constant complaint by our server ops team. BigFix should track restart status independently of other apps that may litter the registry with values. Either that or they should add a BigFix-only tracked restart status to the action view AND a “PendingRestart-Other than BigFix” status into two columns. Otherwise, our guys don’t know if the restart even happened without manually checking. Very annoying”
This is a documented problem (more like poor design decision, since other third party software often don’t clean up after themselves in the referenced registry keys):
As a workaround, you could add two new computer properties, taken from from the logic in the Restart Needed fixlets:
Restart Needed - BES Action
if (name of operating system starts with "Win") then (((exists key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix\EnterpriseClient\BESPendingRestart" of it AND exists value "BESPendingRestart" of key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix\EnterpriseClient\BESPendingRestart" of it) of registry OR (exists key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce" of it AND exists value "BESPendingRestart" of key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce" of it) of registry) and pending restart) else (pending restart)
Restart Needed - External/Other
if (windows of operating system) then ((NOT (exists key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix\EnterpriseClient\BESPendingRestart" of it AND exists value "BESPendingRestart" of key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix\EnterpriseClient\BESPendingRestart" of it) of registry AND NOT (exists key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce" of it AND exists value "BESPendingRestart" of key "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunServicesOnce" of it) of registry) and pending restart) else (false)