Confused about __Download folders

Content Authoring
1

Hi, I’ve been playing around with a deployment task for a while and just as I’ve figured out what my problem was, I’m running in to the following error when it checks for the files every ~10 minutes:

At 14:52:50 +1000 -
ActionLogMessage: (action:96952) Non-Distributed - DownloadsAvailable
ActionLogMessage: (action:96952) Action signature verified for Execution
ActionLogMessage: (action:96952) Cannot empty _Download directory

What __Download directory is this talking about, exactly? My understanding of the __Download folders is that there’s a temporary cache for each site, so since I’ve created this task under the “Workstations” site, my files should go there. Where I’m confused is that the "C:\Program Files (x86)\BigFix Enterprise\BES Client\__BESData\CustomSite_Workstations\__Download" directory is currently empty already.

If the target directory is already empty, why do the logs say that it can’t empty it?

Thanks in advance :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

I should add that the following directory:

C:\Program Files (x86)\BigFix Enterprise\BES Client\__BESData\__Global\__Cache\Downloads

Already had files from a different task in it which was still running from yesterday.
I think I’ve already answered my own question, since I’ve stopped the task from yesterday the folder should empty itself and then the new action should continue running…

Can someone please confirm whether I’m right or not? Also, if this is THE __Download folder specified by {basefolder}, why did I find my files in the custom site’s __Download folder above?

3

So if you had a task that didn’t exit running yesterday and there were files involved – when you kill the BigFix action, BigFix just pretends nothing is happening anymore.

The problem is those files are probably still open if you open task manager, BigFix never killed the processes when it stopped the action. You have to kill the processes in task manager or reboot the computer if you have a long-lifed process running out of the __Download folder.

The folder most likely to have this issue is definitely your custom site folder:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\BigFix Enterprise\BES Client\__BESData\CustomSite_Workstations\__Download"

If you run into this issue the agent will still run actions without downloads so if you know what executable is causing it you can make an action that kills that process and run it against the hung machines.

Bill

4

Hi Bill

Thanks for your response, it seems really simple now that you’ve explained it to me.
I’ll watch out for that in the future, and see if I can work around installations that are already going for computers that are seldomly turned on.

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5

Glad I could help!

If you make an analysis with this as a property:

pathnames whose (it contains "__Download") of image files of processes whose (creation time of it < now - 1*hour)

This as a property breaks down as the following:

  1. Give me a list of processes that have been alive for more than an hour

    processes whose (creation time of it < now - 1*hour)

  2. Get me a File object for the process

    `image files of processes``

  3. Get me the path of where those processes are and only give me the ones that have __Download in the path

    pathnames whose (it contains "__Download") of image files

This should help you identify long lived processes in the __Download folder. This won’t find everything – for instance, batch scripts running out of the download folder will have an image file path of C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe and not __Download but it should get you started hunting!

1 Like
6

I’m making it now, that’ll be really helpful since we need to deploy quite a few Adobe/Autodesk packages that are so large that you can’t tell if they’re still going or have failed.

Thanks again!