I would like to understand the caching process at the client end in BigFix.
Lets cook up a scenario.
I have a laptop which has 2.5GB of free space.
I need to push a 1GB installer down to the client and run it.
Now, when the packaged installer reaches the client, the free space becomes 1.5GB.
What I would like to know is, at this moment of time, when it unpacks the package, does it delete the initial file? Or do I have two files - the initial package and the unpacked package taking up 1GB each.
If so, is there any way that I can delete away the initial package before commencing installation so that I can free up enough space for the installation.
After you extract the package, you have to manually delete the compressed package. I think you’ll have three files:
-The package you downloaded
-A cached copy of the package you downloaded (under __BESData__Global__Cache\Downloads)
-The extracted package.
And yes, you should be able to delete the initial package by using a ‘delete’ command in action script. Just delete whatever the package name is. If you want to clear the cache out as well, you can use something like this:
dos del /F /Q /S “{pathname of folder “__BESData__Global__Cache\Downloads” of parent folder of regapp “Besclient.exe” & “.”}”
However, my recommendation is to leave the cache around until the installation completes. At the end of your task, you can use an if statement in action script to only clear out the cache if the installation is successful. That way, you’re not re-downloading the 1GB package again if the installation fails the first time.
You can also set the maximum download cache size using _BESClient_Download_DownloadsCacheLimitMB (See: http://support.bigfix.com/bes/misc/besconfigsettings.html#BESClient). The cache is supposed to clean up after itself when it reaches a certain size, but I never had much luck with that. During our build process, the cache on our clients has reached 40GB+ from all the packages we install, even though it should still be at the default of 20MB. It does seem to get cleaned up after a few days though. If you want instant gratification, I still suggest running the del command above after a successful install.
Thanks for the reply. I guess our choice would be to delete the package after extracting. This is for the extreme scenario where the machine might not have enough space to handle the package, the extracted files and the installation at the same time.