Automatic Group of Computers reachable by WebUI Query?

How crazy hard would it be to define a Relevance for an Automatic Computer Group that identified computers that are available to be queried via the WebUI Query tool? I regularly need to test things on live computers that aren’t my own, but it’s not easy to find a computer that is actually (a) on our work network instead of at home and (b) listening on the BigFix port for a request from the server. I took a look at the relevance for the “Firewall is Blocking BES Traffic” fixlets and…wow. The Windows one is crazy complicated and the macOS one is simple but only effective for Snow Leopard (!!!). Any relevance geniuses out there have any ideas?

It’s actually a little bit trickier than that. If it’s a client at home, you probably can’t reach it even if Windows Firewall has the traffic allowed (you still have to deal with their home router blocking (as it should) or with their ISP blocking the traffic).

One approach you might test is using

last command times of client

This should return the last time the client received a UDP notification, for a new site version, action, fixlet, etc.

One might guess that a client that has received a UDP notification within, say, the last 6 hours is likely to also be able to receive a Query notification over UDP.

Take this with some grain of salt though - I haven’t tested whether Command Polling would trigger this result to update even if the message wasn’t received over UDP.

Some relevance to test might be

(now - last command time of client) < 6 * hour

You could change the time interval to be more or less aggressive to suit.

https://developer.bigfix.com/relevance/reference/client.html#last-command-time-of-client-time

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On second thought, if the client has never received a command, that might yield an error. Some result, it wouldn’t be put into the group, but it would be better from a debug logging standpoint if it didn’t throw an error.

exists (last command time of client) whose (now - it < 6 * hour)

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Of course, if you want to be able to Query most any device in BigFix (regardless of network location), without having to worry about these types of elements, you can leverage Persistent Connections.

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Thanks for your input, guys.

@JasonWalker: I was planning on combining the “is the firewall open” portion with a “are you on the same network as the server” portion. I will check out the command time options. Thanks!

@Aram: Persistent Connections looks very interesting. Thank you!