Hi all …
In general, you don’t have to know how an automatic transmission works if you drive a car with one; you just have to know to select drive or reverse, and step on the gas to move the car.
But I feel I would be a better BigFix administrator if I knew some more about its “transmission”.
Are there any BigFix training classes “out there” that you’d recommend, epsecially ones that go into troubleshooting?
–Mark
Hi Mark,
IBM has some open mic sessions available on youtube that give a lot of information about troubleshooting BigFix.
IBM BigFix Open Mic Troubleshoot Not Reported Actions 27 Aug 2015
IBM Open Mic: Using BigFix Software Distribution 2015-10-07
They also had some open mic sessions about relay configuration but I’m able to find them at the moment.
Wouter
I have never found very good tutorials about the underpinnings of the BigFix infrastructure that are very complete and cover all the ground required to fully understand it.
This is something that I will be working on in general, and I have partially addressed in the past.
One thing I do like about BigFix is most of the things about it can be discovered through experimentation. This is primarily how I came to understand much of BigFix.
I would strongly recommend setting up a Trial BigFix Server in a VM. You can run it with near full access for 30 days. You can do quite a bit with just that Trial server, but if you have a couple of test client VMs to put in it, you can go further. You can set another up from scratch every time you want to take another crack at it. This is a great way to experience the server admin side if you have never done that, but it is also a great way to experiment without worry of breaking anything in production.
Also, read the logs. They are hard to understand at first, but they are very important. Anything you don’t understand in them, search the web and the forums, and post in the forums if you can’t find anything about the particular item in the log and want to know more. The client logs are a very important aspect of learning how BigFix actually works particularly in terms of the sequence of events during action execution.
I would also make sure to go to the BigFix Downloads webinar coming up – I like to think of BigFix at its heart as basically a small CDN (Content Distribution Network). The biggest thing that helped me was understanding how content is distributed and how operators actions correspond to changes in the infrastructure.
For instance, take an action from a master operator account or make a fixlet and watch what happens in the __BESData/Actionsite folder. Push out a patch and try to find what changes on the server, relays, and clients. As @jgstew said – the best way to truly understand is through constant experimentation with all aspects of the product!
This is a good point about BigFix. It is made up of many smaller parts that can be well understood on their own, but it gets much more powerful and complicated and mysterious when viewed as a whole.
BigFix has aspects that are like:
Each part taken own its own is actually simpler than it may seem at first.
@jgstew … great minds think alike 
I already have a test lab with BigFix that I use to learn & try out things. I also got to know the BigFix client log really well and this post in particular was great in walking one through it: How do I get my relays to store and provide packages/tasks?
–Mark