We have some new equipment in our organization that was previously used within an organization that had their own implementation of BigFix. So these devices all have the BES Client installed, reporting to BES Root Servers that are not ours.
Our theory was that uninstalling the BES Client (using add/remove programs) and then installing our BES Client would do the trick. Apparently, not so. Reports are that the BES Clients are still reporting to their old server.
It looks like the ActionSite.afxm still exists on the device after an uninstall.
Is this the root cause of our issue? Why does the ActionSite remain after an uninstall?
For now, I’m having techs run the BES Removal Tool instead of a typical uninstall.
Yeah, the uninstaller doesn’t clean up any of the BigFix client settings in the registry. This includes what server he reports to, and other client settings. i bet if you look at the client log file you will see he’s trying to report to the old server name, not your server.
I had a similar problem in our environment when we re-installed BigFix in order to switch to a DNS name.
So what you need to do is uninstall, then go into the registry and delete the BigFix key under software in HKLM. When you reinstall with your version of the client, it should then talk to your server fine. Right now, I doubt you’ll be able to get your server to deploy any actions to these clients.
The way I rationalize this behavior is that the uninstall program can only remove items that he knows exist and that he put in place, which does not include some of the client settings that are put there after the installer finishes.
As far as I know, I can’t push actions to clients that I can’t see. The BigFix server that these devices are presently reporting to is outside of my organization, and I will not be able to coordinate an action with that team. Getting the devices “clean” for an install is probably the best we can do.
Doing the same on Mac clients as well, using the Uninstaller app.
It seems odd to me that the standard uninstall leaves so much behind.