General question: Is there anywhere that documents the structure and purpose(s) of the various folders within the “__BESData” folder?
Specific scenario that might or might not be addressed by the answer to the General Question:
I’m looking to run periodic scripts that create data files with information that can’t natively be read by BES Agent inspectors (primarily on macOS, for things like “last 20 logins” or “drive encryption state” that don’t live in a plist or an sqlite db). There will then be analyses that read those files.
Those analyses will live in a Custom Site which, conveniently enough, has a folder in “__BESData”! Would somewhere in that folder (like “__Local” or “__Local/Tmp” or “_Local/CustomFolderName" or just the root of the "CustomSite” folder) be an acceptable place to put those files? If no, where would you recommend?
Not sure about the answer to your first question about documentation of the various folders within the “__BESData” folder. As far as the rest of your post, I occasionally place files in the root of the BES Client directory but never under the __BESData folder since that’s managed by the client (is also deleted in certain troubleshooting scenarios). As such you wouldn’t have any reasonable expectation that your custom files would not be removed also.
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I don’t know that it’s documented, but in general I’d avoid using the __BESData folder for anything custom / outside the control of the BESClient itself.
Even for our out-of-box content, we tend to go a level higher (for instance Inventory using ‘BES Client/LMT’ rather than putting it under BESData). To find that folder dynamically we refer to ‘parent folder of parent folder of client folder of site “actionsite”’ to get to the BES Client directory.
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To be totally honest I store stuff in __BESdata\__Global\myFolderName all the time and never have had an issue. A lot of my fixlets for encryption and other things store report files in there.
Of course not officially recommended but you only live once, ya know?
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Similarly, I routinely store stuff in folder "com.domain.org" of storage folder of client. Lots of scripts that generate output files, the files later slurped up by analyses.
The relevance is short, I know I created it, and I know it won’t fun afoul of anything inside __BESData.
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