I am having a strange issue with patching Windows 2K3 servers and was hoping someone could help. Last Thursday evening I scheduled critical patches for 10 Win2K3 servers by way of a one time action since we do not use baselines. Eight of the servers received the patches during the time scheduled and restarted, which is what we wanted. Two behaved strangely in that they received all of the patches but they did not restart. I decided to check on them using remote desktop and oddly enough once logged in successfully I received the BigFix dialog box asking me to accept the reboot. Huh?
Since these are not critical servers I went ahead and restarted them both during the business day but now I am concerned about having issues with more important servers where bounces during the business day would not be possible so I’ve halted patching until this gets resolved. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.
Pretty sure if you search (not sure what the terms would be) the forums there have been other reports of this and BigFix is aware of it and working on a fix.
I think the issue you mentioned is a problem we found recently that involves “stranded” remote sessions… The specific case that we found is related to remote control software that doesn’t fully close the remote session and so Windows keeps a “blank” remote session open. In such a case, the BigFix Agent tries unsuccessfully to launch the restart message box into this session (which doesn’t work) and this causes the agent to be unable to restart the computer.
We were able to reproduce this behavior with some open source remote control software and another customer mentioned that they saw it with RAdmin (but we haven’t done extensive testing with different remote control software).
We have made a change to the agent so that these stranded sessions will not interfere with the Agent’s ability to restart. This should effectively make the problem go away completely. We will be releasing a patched BigFix Agent very shortly (7.2.5… probably will release early next week) that will address this issue.