BigFix announces the availability of BES 7.0.9. BES 7.0.9 includes localization changes (now supporting Japanese and Chinese languages), provides several minor fixes and enhancements, and includes a critical security fix found during a security audit and code review. BigFix highly recommends upgrading BES Servers, Relays, Web Reports, and Consoles for security reasons and to take advantage of the newest features and bug fixes.
If you are upgrading from BES 7.0.1 or earlier, the BES Server and all BES Consoles need to be upgraded to 7.0.9 at the same time. BES Clients and Relays may be upgraded independently.
This upgrade is available to all BES customers at no charge. As with all BES upgrades, you can upgrade any component manually or by using Fixlet messages available on the BES Support Fixlet site.
My company has stopped upgrading the BigFix Client and deploying BigFix Relay Agents to servers because the BigFix Console no longer has the v7.0.7 versions available for these two items. We run a very controlled shop (Federal Regulations require this), so we try to keep our software versions the same throughout the environment. Since the release of v7.0.9, we can no longer do this.
Can BigFix create separate Fixlets for 7.0.7 and 7.0.9 and then let their customers decide when to upgrade their components?
1 - The Fixlet for the BigFix Relay Agent v7.0.7.82 is only the Upgrade Fixlet. There is no Fixlet to install the BigFix Relay Agent v7.0.7.82.
2 - The Fixlet for the BigFix Client v7.0.7.96 has the “Logging Service Installed”. I need the original Fixlet that did not contain this additional logging service.
3 - BigFix is supposed to be making administration easier for me. Removing/replacing content from my BigFix Console without my permission / approval is not making administration easier for me. I now have to go back and reimport the old Fixlets. And because of the above issues, I now have to wait for the correct Fixlets to be posted on the Web Site (http://support.bigfix.com/bes/install/beswindowsarchive.html)
So, I guess I agree that BigFix did “try”, however, more work still needs to be done. In the future, my recommendation stands that you should ADD the content for the new BigFix versions rather than REPLACING or DELETING the previous Fixlets.
We actually used to do it the way you suggest, but we got a lot of complaints that admins and the operators were accidentally upgrading to the wrong versions because they picked the wrong Fixlets and they would be very unhappy when they would have to re-upgrade again. Additionally, many companies will globally hide upgrade Fixlets and if we add new Fixlets, they sometimes would forget to re-hide them and that can cause issues too.
So we moved to the the method of updating the upgrade Fixlet when we do a new build release (i.e., 7.0.7->7.0.9) and then publish the older Fixlets for those who need them.
It seems like the requirements conflict somewhat in this case and we can’t find a way to make everyone happy, but hopefully for companies like you that need access to the older Fixlets (for internal process or external regulation rules), importing the older Fixlets can be just a minor annoyance.
We will address the issues you raised regarding the archived Fixlets. Thanks for noting that.
The upgrade fixlet has failed dramatically on about half of our test servers. Looking at the logs, the upgrade executable was downloaded and ran, but after uninstalling the old version it appears to have died, leaving the machine unmanageable.
Re-installing the old version resulted in all fields displaying in the BES console. I had to run the uninstall first, then a fresh install to get the data to show properly.
I see the exact same behavior if I manually download the upgrade executable and run it from the computer. It uninstalls the old version, then dies before installing the new version. The non-upgrade installer for 7.0.9 works fine.
All the failed computers were running Windows 2003 with SP2 or no service pack. No other platforms have been tested yet.
I will get someone from our support team to contact you. I don’t believe anyone else has reported this and it seems that an awful lot of people have upgraded according to our download logs so hopefully we can spot what the specific issue is.
We are upgrading from 7.0.7 to 7.0.9. Since we were only half way done deploying 7.0.7 clients, we decided to install the 7.0.9 clients before upgrading the server/consoles. Now it seems the clients are getting errors when trying to sync with out custom actionsite (see error below.) I suspect it has something to do with the signing keys. From reading the announcement, I thought you could upgrade the clients independently. Does this mean i now have to upgrade the server for the clients to see the custom actionsite?
From error log: “FAILED to Synchronize - BigFix could not verify the authenticity of the site content.”
dgibson, we expect that 7.0.9 agents will be fine reporting to 7.0.7 server and we will need to investigate this issue to see if it is related to the upgrade or something else…
Also… we added a Fixlet today that helps you upgrade the agents that you had installed using the MSI package… We think that this Fixlet will resolve the issue that BrianC experienced that was probably related to an MSI upgrade issue. So be aware of the existence of both of those Fixlets.
