BES Client Helper Service - Extinct?

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1

I know this service came out long ago before OS’s were able to restart failed services, so it had a purpose. Does this service still have a purpose; enough to make it worth deploying? In other words, has any new development been done on this service? The description “perform a number of troubleshooting steps” is vague.

My view is that it should either be updated to perform newer troubleshooting tasks or be put out to pasture.

For example:

  • Address low disk space (maybe kick off Storage Sense or a pop-up to the user at a configurable threshold)
  • Address or detect WMI issues
  • Advanced BES Client troubleshooting
  • Support for other non-Windows OS’s

I know the BES Client itself and do a lot of stuff, but offloading those to an optional service could be a neat feature.

2

I’d also like to see something like “BES Client Helper Service” for the other platforms, particularly Mac, Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux installations.

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3

I support both of your suggestions. Is there an RFE for this already?

4

RFE: Client Helper for Unix & Linux looks similar and is “Under Consideration”.
However, Client Helper for Unix & Linux this one was “Declined”.

Hope they will implement one eventually.

It might also be good if someone in the community (with more bash skills than I have) could write a bash script that could be run as a cron job to check for the besclient process running, and if not running, kick off the besclient restart command. Roll it up in a Fixlet/Task to install/configure it and stick it up on BigFix.me

5

FWIW, on macOS launchd seems to handle this by itself. If you stop the client with sudo launchctl stop com.bigfix.BESAgent, or just kill the PID, it fires right up again.

I concur that this would be useful on Linux & UNIX OSes, and voted for the RFE.

6

I would also like to add a feature to restart the BES service when stuck Evaluating. We still come across systems that get hung evaluating and Action. Luckily it still reports in, but any new Actions simply queue up as Evaluating. It doesn’t seem to be any specific Action either. Could be BigFix supplied ones to custom content. The end result is that we have to restart the agent to clear them.

7

Usually when actions get stuck “Evaluating”, it is because some other action is still stuck “Running” - perhaps trying to pop-up dialog that won’t be visible to the user.

8

Understood. We haven’t been able to find a single Action that is causing this; it would be one of our Policies. But as it happens on such a small percentage, its tough to catch and I don’t think it is a single action.

9

Have you tried the settings for a global action wait/waithidden timeout? I think I recall you commenting on the thread.l but can’t find it now.