I have the BigFix console loaded on two different systems and on both, once i close down/exit the console, i can never get it to come back up unless i reboot the systems.
Has anyone else come across this problem and is there a fix/work around?
Both systems are running windows 10 and i have BigFix console version 9.5.11.191 running.
Sorry, I can’t say I’ve encountered or even heard of that as a problem before. Do you get any messages when you try to start it back up?
I would check whether the console process is locked in some way instead of exiting when you close the console…after closing the console start Task Manager and see whether there is still a besconsole.exe running.
No error messages, when I try and reload the console, it comes up and prompts me for my log creds, i put them in and the orginal console splash screen just sits there. If i place my pointer over the screen, i get the revolving pointer like its trying to load but it never comes up. As part of my troubleshooting has been to verify that there are no IBM/Bigfix processes are running before trying to bring the console back up.
I’d suggest you may need to open a ticket with support on this. It’s definitely not normal.
If you’re troubleshooting on your own, I’d use Process Monitor ( www.microsoft.com/sysinternals ) to watch what the BESConsole.exe process is trying to access when it hangs.
It does sound like the console didn’t shut down. This is probably the reason it doesn’t start up again. Check the processes in Windows before you start and see if the console is in the list still. If it is you may have an issue.
I know this is an old post, but we have had the same issue for a few years now. We noticed the issue only happened on devices that had Dell Encryption installed. We use DDPE and leverage their policy-based encryption. We were able to get the console to continue launching if we renamed the cache folder. While the console is in a hung state, rename the folder C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\BigFix\Enterprise Console\servername\username. A new one will immediately get created and the old one can be deleted. We have tried excluding this folder in the encryption policies but it did not help.
We are currently testing a batch script that renames the folder prior to launch. The interesting discovery is we can rename the folder and rename it back so the old cache can be used. This seems to work on a current test device but only if the exclusion policy to not encrypt is added.
We are working will Dell on trying to get the proper exclusion policy added or other solution at the moment.
I’m not familiar with that specific Dell encryption product, but we do have it documented that the console cache folder needs to be excluded from antivirus scanning.
The console writes thousands of tiny files there, and keeps SQLite databases. Fast performance is required, and there are known issues that occur if a file stays locked by an antivirus product and cannot be updated/deleted when expected.
That said, Bit locker and other encryption products I’ve used have been fine. Those general work based on “blocks on disk” and not “file handles” so file locking isn’t generally a problem with them.