The IBM BigFix team is pleased to announce the release of version 9.5 Patch 7 (9.5.7.90) of the BigFix Platform.
The main features included in this release are:
Enhanced Client Deploy Tool - allows for simple “Right-Click & Deploy” of the BES Agent from unmanaged assets to any endpoint regardless of OS (including different agent versions)
… how do I use it?!? The Release Notes page looks like maybe it’s missing a few sub-bullets? I don’t see how to use the new locked file inspector or wait command timeout…
For inspecting locked files, we have introduced 4 new inspectors to access data within the locked file: locked line, locked content, locked section, and locked key. So you would use something like
exists locked line whose (it as string starts with "Error") of file "C:\path\inusefile.log"
For command timeout, you will use the override option on the wait command with new keywords “timeout_seconds” set to the number of seconds until the command times out, and “disposition” set to either abandon or terminate. For example, to have a command timeout after 10 mins and allow the process to continue running in the background, use this actionscript:
Gotta say, I’m a little disappointed in that method for handling the ‘wait’ timeout. A lot of the things that hang are not my content (the JRE upgrades are a frequent culprit).
I was hoping for a client setting to handle ‘wait’ timeouts globally, to prevent the client from becoming unresponsive when a command is never going to terminate.
The new 'locked lines of file, inspectors are exciting, and so is the better performance I’m seeing from ‘lines of file’ generally.
We were a bit concerned about people overusing this approach because of convenience and killing or abandoning processes excessively, but we are considering this enhancement for the next release. For now, you can still modify the actionscript during deployment for external content.
I am interested in a global timeout setting as well, that’d be great. Sucks when a machine is hung up on a certain thing and is never going to let go without intervention … move on to the next thing!
Much appreciated, please keep it under consideration. With sufficient warnings, I think this would be useful because once the BES client is tied up in an action, it won’t execute any new actions that we might send to take corrective actions. Even if we were to “stop” the offending action, the client is still tied up waiting for the external process. Nothing short of restarting the BES client can clear it, and even then we may have trouble with subsequent actions because the stuck external process has the __Download folder locked.
In my environment, I’ve already had to implement a process that is crude and I hate very much. I have a scheduled task running every half, checking with qna.exe to find processes that are child processes of besclient.exe, and have been running more than 2 hours, to kill them.
Just to clarify, you can regain control of the client by stopping the action, though you may have issues clearing the __Download folder as you described. Stopping an action will cause the client to detach from the process, which is what the new timeout option will do with disposition=abandon.
I can’t recall if this behavior changed at some point, but maybe in an earlier version you tested with, it didn’t behave this way. It does in 9.2+, though.
Where the Timeout would be helpful in our case, but which may not be what this update allows, is this:
We have a baseline that uninstalls older Office installs using those MS scrubber scripts. Most of the time, all is well, but sometimes, the scrubber will complete, but will remain running in BF; so it never moves on to the next component in the baseline (installing Office 365). A reboot will kick off the next component, but it would be great if after 30 minutes for example, the component would move on to the next.
Can you tell me if this feature will help with this scenario?
It may help, since it would allow the client to continue on with the action even if the scrubber stays running. But if the scrubber is running out of the __Downloads directory, then it would prevent later actions from starting their downloads. You can move the scrubber scripts to another temp directory and run it from there to prevent that problem.
I also added one feature missing from the original post which should be very helpful for those managing systems in different countries/encodings, or just files in different character set encodings.
The updated WebUI configuration that directly accesses the database is available in 9.5.5 and higher platform versions. You need to use the task “Deploy WebUI Database Configuration” (ID #2687) (after upgrading the platform) to enable the new config for auto patch.
move on to the next thing!