We recently upgraded the BES enviroment to 7.2. I am seeing a strange thing where when i use the windows tool to remove/disconnect USB drives safely it will not do so. It will say something is currently using the device. When i use a tool called Unlocker it says the BES client is using it. This is strange because the BESclient was idle and we weren’t deploying anything to this server. Any ideas? THis is happening on two Windows 2003 Servers running the same 7.2.4.60 version of the client.
The BES Agent maintains a handle on all drives with type “DRIVE_FIXED” because it has a “drive watcher” mechanism to see if anything has changed on the drive. This mechanism is an optimization built into the BES Agent with the idea is that if the disk hasn’t changed, there should be no reason to re-check the different file versions, etc.
The BES Agent specifically does not do this on drives with type “DRIVE_REMOVABLE” to prevent issues like the one you are mentioning below. I bet your USB drive is incorrectly reporting type “DRIVE_FIXED”
(you can test this by running the following relevance clause in QNA).
q: (name of it, type of it) of drives
q: (name of it, type of it) of drives
A: C:, DRIVE_FIXED
A: D:, DRIVE_CDROM
A: E:, DRIVE_REMOVABLE
I am surprised you only see this with 7.2 because there hasn’t been any changes to this part of the agent in years…
Luckily, we built a setting to disable this behavior for exactly this reason… You can use the client setting:
You don’t lose too much… Theoretically, if the drive hasn’t been touched and it has files that BigFix wants to look at, BigFix will know it doesn’t need to bother to check them because they can’t have changed if the drive hasn’t changed. But it practice, drives change very often so this optimization isn’t going to be a huge win.
@BenKus
Can you please help, how to disable the use of USB on linux??
it is the urgent requirement from the client.
I tried to do it manually and successfully did it, but is there any action script to do it from console??