Copy folder from BESRootServer to client

1

Hi!

I’m trying to install an application in some computers.

What the application needs to be installed is:

  1. Copy installation folders in C: \ Program Files (x86) \

  2. Copy app’s icon into desktop

I don’t know if there’s anyway to do this.

What I’ve tried so far is:

Compressing the files

  1. Compress the installation folders
  2. Send the file to the clients
  3. Extract the .rar --> this is what I don’t know how to do. Based on what I’ve searched, there’s no way to unrar a file from BigFix (the extract command only extract files compressed by BigFix).

Copying from a directory

  1. Send an action to the clients using a powershell script like:

copy '\ server \ c$ \ installation folders ’ -Destination ‘C:\Program Files (x86)’ -Recurse

This should work, but unfortunately the clients do not have access to this folder to make the copy.

Is there another way I can do this?

Thanks!

2
  • Compressing the files - it would work but don’t use rar if you are not sure that the clients already have commandline version of rar already there. If you want to use the default “extract” command you need to compress the file using BigFix Archive tool (you can compress files/folder structure/etc) Once you have the .tmp file you can download that to the clients and use “extract” command directly.
  • Copying from a directory - Agent generally runs as LocalSystem, unless you have been installing it with customization to run under specific account, and LocalSystem cannot access ANY network resources. If you are inclined to get it to work this way, I would suggest you look into the override and specify an account to run the command under that would have access to the network share. You can get it to work though this way too!
1 Like
3

A few ways you could do it -

  • If you have LifeCycle, use the “Manage Software Distribution” Dashboard to create an archive of the folder. This uses the BFArchive format and can be extracted with the ‘extract’ command in ActionScript.

  • Download the BFArchive.exe utility from https://bigfix-wiki.hcltechsw.com/wikis/home?lang=en-us#!/wiki/BigFix%20Wiki/page/BFArchive%20Tool and use that to create the archive, again can be extracted using the ‘extract’ command.

  • ZIP the folder, and either build a PowerShell script using the ‘Extract-Archive’ cmdlet, or download the unzip.exe utility to extract the ZIP archive. BigFix has several out-of-box fixlets that need to unzip files, so we host our own build of the zip utility that you can download via

add prefetch item name=unzip.exe sha1=84debf12767785cd9b43811022407de7413beb6f size=204800 url=http://software.bigfix.com/download/redist/unzip-6.0.exe sha256=2122557d350fd1c59fb0ef32125330bde673e9331eb9371b454c2ad2d82091ac

4

Jason, thanks for your answer.

We’ve decided to use the Software Distribution Wizard.

  1. Copied the installation folder into the BES Root Server’s desktop
  2. Created the wizard installation in BigFix (using the folder option which already compresses the file)
  3. Edited the action so the extract command also places the folders in “C:…”

It didn’t work as expected, we got “Failed”. Is there anyway to get the client logs without using RDP? (we have no access to these computers).

Thanks!

5

Sure! To retrieve the client logs, I often use the BigFix Query app in WebUI. I have a reusable relevance that I save in the Query app

locked lines of files ((year of it as string & month of it as two digits & day_of_month of it as two digits) of date (local time zone) of now & ".log") of folders "__Global/Logs" of (data folder of client)
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6

Thank you for that, definitely using this from now on

7

Wachting the logs, I can see that what failed is the __wait command, surprisingly.

The action we’ve deployed was the default (the one that comes in the wizard) but changing the extract command so it extracts it in the correct folder

prefetch …
extract … “C:\Program Files (x86)”

wait __Download\

Should I change the wait command too so it’s the same as in the extract command?

8

The ‘wait’ command is to execute something, like a ‘setup.exe’ or ‘msiexec’ command. You can’t really “execute” a folder.

If all you need is to extract the files, and you don’t need any kind of setup to run, you should be able to just omit the ‘wait’ line entirely.

(Though you should check that ‘extract’ is doing what you want, you may need to use ‘folder create’ to create a new subdirectory beneath Program Files (x86) and then extract to the new folder)

1 Like
9

Thanks! Trying this right now