Well I have an interesting development.
You can run BigFix on a Raspberry Pi using the QEMU emulator. It will never be a good option for a relay, but it may have other potential uses. The QEMU emulator allows running an x86 linux distro ontop of the ARM one running on the RaspberryPi. It only virtualizes a single CPU and is slow. It is very possible that it could be made faster through optimizations.
My first attempt was using a faster paid x86 emulation product, but I couldn’t get it to work:https://eltechs.com/product/exagear-desktop
**This is actually a RaspberryPi running BigFix:**https://alpha.bigfix.com/common/ui/devices/6516746
Notice the CPU is listed as a 0 MHz Celeron
Poorly documented steps:
- I first put berryboot on a raspberrypi 3
- I then installed Ubuntu MATE
- I then installed QEMU and some other stuff
- I downloaded a Debian x86 Standard Live CD (command line only)
- I booted the live CD using
qemu-system-i386 - I ran my install_bigfix.sh script which installed the debian x86 bigfix agent
- I then waited. It took a while to finish provisioning and sending in a full report because of the slow CPU emulation
You do need to tell QEMU to only emulate a single CPU, otherwise it doesn’t work.
###Next Steps:
See if I can get CentOS x86 or x64 running on a RaspberryPi so that it could be a Relay. I don’t actually intend for it to be used as a proper relay, but installing a relay on it is the best way to get it to respond to UDP quickly. I find the possibility of being able to use BFQuery in the WebUI on a RaspberryPi intriguing.
Also, some better documentation and hopefully automation around actually doing this.
Partial script and references: https://github.com/jgstew/tools/blob/master/bash/setup_qemu_ubuntu.sh
Ideally IBM would provide an actual ARM build of the BigFix agent for Debian/Ubuntu/Others, in which case BigFix could run natively on the RaspberryPi, but in the meantime, QEMU is a less than awesome option.