BigFix Server downloading Chrome over and over

[DirtySneakers]

BigFix server downloads around 100MB every few minutes (dl.google.com) as seen from our firewall. I’m assuming it’s the Chrome Browser being downloaded over and over?

How can we stop this from occurring?

Thanks!

[JasonWalker]

Find the Action that’s attempting to download Chrome, and stop the action.

The likely cause is that Google hosts a single download link for Chrome, that always downloads the latest version. If you have an action from an older Chrome Fixlet, and the download is not already cached on your server, the download will get the latest version and the hash won’t match the expected download version.
The server periodically retries the download (which will never succeed as we can no longer download the older, expected version).

[mesee2]

If your looking to have bigfix run the chrome update to keep things up to date all fhe time, consider using Webui Patch policy and have the action only run for a few hours or a day, and run every day with daily refresh of the source. This way you dont have to keep manually stopping and starting and updating the action.

I have a auto patchpolicy not intended to do this just for chrome, but to just always keep some lab systems up to date each day - and chrome is auto updated each time there is a new release nothing for me to manually do.

[DirtySneakers]

Thanks Jason for your response. I did find some google chrome actions from “server_audit” file but each and every one of them have been deleted. I’m at a loss here. I checked the firewall logs again and in some cases the download of 100MB occurs half a dozen times in a minute. So each and every hour our bigfix server downloads what I assume to be Google Chrome at least 90 times.

Is there any other ideas to locate the cause of these downloads? We are on BigFix version 10.x

Thanks in advance.

[DirtySneakers]

Ok I believe I found the actions surrounding Google Chrome. Actions contain both the latest version and superseded fixlets for Chrome.

Question 1: The remove option is greyed out for the superseded fixlets. How can I remove these older versions?

Question 2: Is mesee2 suggestions above the recommended method to update Chrome on our PCs?

Thanks!

[JasonWalker]

For Q1, you can’t delete Fixlets that are in External Site (the ones we publish). You can Hide them, remove them from Baselines, or choose not to Action them.

If you’ve previously deployed the older Chrome version, that download should be cached on your Root Server and the Fixlet would continue to work, using the previously-downloaded file.

That leads into Q2. Ensure your Root Server is configured with a large enough download cache to handle your expected patching load (whether your cycle is weekly, monthly, etc), and take an action from the Chrome Fixlet soon after its release (targeting any computer, even just one) so the file gets cached and the Fixlet can then be used indefinitely. Patch Policy is a good way to get the download cached.

If you always want to download the latest version of Chrome, I posted a task to BigFix.me for that. It downloads whichever version is current as of the time you take the action - but because I don’t know what version that is, there’s no version detection relevance on the Fixlet and we can’t validated the downloaded installer’s hash value.

[DirtySneakers]

Thank you. Problem solved!