Deploy dynamic file to client

Content Authoring
1

Hi, All

  We want to deploy a file to the client.
  But the file would update on the server.
  We found that if the file is updated, the task still re-deploy the old file not the newest file.

  How could we let bigfix to always deploy the new file to client?

The action script:
download http://bigfixserver:52311/Uploads/test.csv

delete "C:\test.csv"
copy “__Download\test.csv” “C:\Windows\test.csv”

Thanks for the help.

2

There are several ways to do dynamic downloads. Each has pros and cons and can be useful depending on the situation. I’ve used all of them.

  1. ‘download now as’ - If you use this option, it will instruct the Bigfix client to use a native actionscript command to do the download, however it will go directly to the requested url, bypassing the relay infrastructure. You can do relevance substitution in the url if desired. See this post for an example.
  2. WGET - This is a versatile utility that allows many download options.
  3. CURL - Also another good utility with several different options.

Choose whichever way best suits your situation. I find when using WGET or CURL it is helpful to embed it into dynamically generated script where I can do relevance substitution.

1 Like
3

BigFix also has native support for dynamic downloads with security in mind (as options such as download now do not verify file hashes).

Here’s a link for documentation: https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/guide/dynamic_download.html

And here are some related Forum posts:

4

As mentioned, there are trade-offs with each method. The three choices I described allow full range of choices both in terms of how you get the content and the parameters around your download choices. To Aram’s point, they don’t check files hashes, etc. There are situations where security is sensitive and the content is semi-dynamic where Bigfix’s native ‘Dynamic Download’ is a good choice, such as a periodic definition file.

The options I described work well for more trusted, lower security risk data, and highly dynamic content. For example, we use Bigfix in a business process automation workflow where we get dynamic data from backend ERP type systems. As the data is continuously unique, it doesn’t work to create a manifest as it would be perpetually out of date.

1 Like
5

The middle ground is to ensure that you also have a filename.hash_type available as well.

They you can download both test.csv. and test.csv.sha256 and read the sha value from the hash file. This should support security and dynamic updates.

I think inherently you would be hosting it from a location that is not the core server / relays.