I’ve had some reports of clients restarting without warning after applying security patches, resulting in loss of work for the users involved.
I’ve checked the Action History for the PCs involved and can’t find anything to suggest there were any problems. Event logs check out ok etc
Two PCs I’ve looked at so far are both Windows 2000 Pro w/ SP4, BigFix version 7.2
The baseline that was applied should have given a Post-Action message to inform the user they had 4 hours to restart before the restart was done automatically yet they didn’t see the message.
Any suggestions as to how I should troubleshoot this ?
You will want to make sure the BESClientUI is running because that is the piece that controls the restarting behavior.
You can use this property to evaluate if the BESClientUI is running properly (it will return “True” if there is an issue):
(name of operating system = “WinXP” OR name of operating system = “WinVista”) AND (exists logged on users whose (exists name of it AND active of it)) AND (not exists running applications “besclientui.exe”) AND ((not exists setting “_BESClient_ActionManager_UIEnableMode” of client) OR (value of setting “_BESClient_ActionManager_UIEnableMode” of client as lowercase != “all”)) AND (maximum of time values of selects “starttime from win32_logonsession where (LogonType=2 OR LogonType=10)” of wmi < (now - 5 * minute))
Thanks Ben, I’ll add it in as a retrieved property and see what comes back. Would the resolution for any that report as True to simply reinstall the BESClient using a fixlet ?
Actually if you just restart the agent, it should fix the issue… We have found that this issue can occur “randomly” and it is more likely if it takes your system a while to login (like if you have roaming profiles). We can give you a Fixlet to automatically restart the agent if it appears that the BESClientUI doesn’t launch properly often in your deployment.
You can see that we have an upcoming patch release to 7.2 that has extensive BESClientUI changes to eliminate these types of issues:
Hmm, one of the users in question got in touch to say the issue is still affecting him. His PC has definitely had a restart recently so the agent would have been restarted then too. We don’t use roaming profiles and the user’s PC should be fast to login since it’s a new PC and on a good network link.
This problem only seems to affect a couple of users. I’ll inform them that an upcoming patch to BigFix will help. Any other suggestion ? One user in particular is most put out since he lost another hour of work this morning
Each time someone logs in, there is a chance the clientui will fail and it seems some computers are repeat offenders… Try the attached Fixlet and see if that works for you… Set it as a policy and the agent will keep watch on its UI and fix itself if it detects a problem…