(imported topic written by mynameisbear91)
My salesguy (hi Tim!) and his cohorts (hi John! hi other guy who didn’t give me a card!) were in town yesterday, and they spent a few minutes talking with me about how I use BigFix.
Although I couldn’t communicate it clearly to them, what I’d really love is some sample build/configuration/run book entries to adapt to my own environment, instead of starting from scratch.
What is a build/configuration/run book?
Let’s say BigFix had a set of sample documents for a 150 client installation, with just Patch Management.
The document collection could contain…
Sample Build Book: The hardware layout, the volume layout, where things are stored, any recommended hints/tricks/tips to build/rebuild an example production BigFix server (and relays, too.)
Sample Configuration Book: Essentially, a high level overview of everything done to a fresh BigFix install, to prepare it for production. Without going into “point to this button and click this button” detail, lay out the exact configuration of the BigFix infrastructure (which in a company of this size would be very small,) the groups, and the action policy defaults, etc. Most importantly, the reason why each decision was made should be noted for posterity (‘we use two relays because…’)
Sample Run Book: Day-to-day operational procedures for the maintenance and operation of this example BigFix installation. This includes maintenance operations such as doing backups, but is more geared toward things done in the BES Console, such as describing the specific process for rolling out a patch to clients, given the infrastructure documented above.
Sample baselines: Show us what BigFix thinks is a solid set of baselines in a production environment. There could be several takes on what ‘solid’ means, which would give us some ideas.
If such a thing exists around here, I haven’t seen it. I would even find it valuable for BES users of various sizes to sanitize and post their own documents, because it would allow me (and other) overworked admins to draw from a pool of knowledge of what works and what doesn’t.
Thanks for reading,
Bear