Complete vs. Pending Message

Usage and Config
1

(imported topic written by DotA)

Scenario: I have a custom software distribution package that prompts for a reboot post action with a 15min option then forces it after 30mins. Sucess criteria is if the executable has upgraded to the new version. Issue: Some PCs report back as “completed” while others stay at “pending message”. When looking at the action history, the action has completed, I have also gotten confirmation manually that the upgrade has happened on the PC but the status remains as “pending message”. Is this is bug since it’s not happening on all PCs? BTW we are using version 6.0.28.04.

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi DotA,

The status “pending message” will appear if the restart dialog is on the screen… do you see the systems restarting or are they not restarting?

Ben

3

(imported comment written by DotA)

The systems have all restarted, uptimes are 5 days or less (most are 0) and the status is still “pending message”. The package is forcing a reboot after 30mins if no one is at the machine. This package was deployed to 43 PCs on 8/7, 20 reported back as “completed”, 23 are still showing as “pending message” on 8/12.

4

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi DotA,

Here are some thoughts:

  • If an action is stopped or expired, the action status won’t change after that (this is indicated by a “grayed out” status). So if computers were pending message when the action was stopped/expired, then this situation would be expected.

  • There is an outside chance that the agents reported in properly, but your console cache has been corrupted and hasn’t updated this field… you might want to clear it just to be sure…

  • We had a couple issues in the history of the agent where it didn’t get a chance to write out it action status to disk before being restarted and it sometimes led to issues like this with action statuses following a force restart… I thought we had fixed it in 6.0.28, but I can try to dig up more info on this issue…

Ben

5

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

I’m seeing similar behavior for one of our deployments. We forced a restart at an interval of 3 minutes with no option for the user to cancel. About a third of the clients reporting are “Pending Message” with sub-tasks “Pending Restart”. One of the clients is my machine, and I never received the pop-up prompt and was never forced to restart. Clients are 7.0.9.164.

I need to be able to explain to various folks why an action that was supposed to force a restart did not.

6

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Mike,

If you look at the agent logs of the systems that haven’t restarted, do you see any mention of a message like “ClientUI failed to launch”?

Ben

7

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

I found one, and the log looks interesting.

The action completes, and then we see this dialogue:

At 23:59:26 -0400 -

Error posting report to: http://ourserver:52311/cgi-bin/bfenterprise/PostResults.exe

Error building or posting report: FileIOError

At 23:59:29 -0400 -

Client shutdown (Service manager shutdown request)

We have a policy that powers down all of our machines, so I’m wondering if the machine was shut down before completion, or if this is the dialogue we should see when BigFix initiates a reboot?

Otherwise, no error messages and the patches included in the deployment appear to have been installed successfully.