Client Waiting for Another Process to Release Files in Action Download Folder

Usage and Config Patch
1

Hi All, I have deployed an AESS Agent Upgrade to one of my clients. My client status is stuck “pending download”. When I open he action info I see this message; “The client is waiting for another process to release files in the action download folder.”

 Someone on another post (Which I linked below) said this could be because another application is still running and holding a lock on the folder "C:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise\BES Client_BESData\actionsite_download" and you should look in this folder and empty it. 

I have looked in this folder from the server and nothing is in it. Do you have to pull this folder up on the client locally? As in, do I have to remote into the client and open that folder there?

Does anyone have any experience with this error or know how to get around it?

2

Usually that means an earlier action spawned a process in the client’s __Download folder and the process never terminated; the process may be trying to present a user interface dialog but does not have access to the interactive session and cannot display its message.

Yes, you have to troubleshoot this on the client side and will probably need to kill whichever process is running.

You won’t be able to correct this through BigFix because the client won’t process other actions until it can clear the folder.

I set up a system of Scheduled Tasks to find and kill these ‘stuck’ processes, check out my posts on BESChildKiller at Running a command with a timeout . There’s significant overhead to this so it’s only worthwhile if this becomes a recurring problem for you (it happens pretty frequently to me).

I had an RFE to timeout and kill child processes, and it was implemented but the fix doesn’t work for me. It requires setting an override on the ‘wait’ command, which means predicting ahead of time which actions might hang and modifying the action scripts. The hangs for me occur in a lot of default content and I didn’t want to rewrite every fixlet to use the new method.

1 Like
3

In situations like this, you may need an alternative system to cycle the remote agents to free them up. One that we have used successfully on Windows computers is Powershell Remoting (assuming that is enabled on your clients). You can rip through a list of ‘hung-up’ machines with Powershell to cycle the Bigfix agent.

Something like:

$myCredential = Get-Credential
Get-Content –Path "C:\Temp\List.txt” | ForEach-Object –Process `
{
Write-Host "Store $PSItem"
Invoke-Command -Computer ($PSItem + “.domain.com”) -ScriptBlock { Restart-Service -DisplayName ‘BES Client’ -Force -Verbose } -Credential $myCredential
}