This was always a challenge for me. Luckily the mustache himself Mike Stone was around to show me how to do this correctly. Hopefully this is helpful for some of you in the future.
There used to be a tool called SuperOrca that was a little easier to do this kind of thing with, but I don’t think it is available anymore.
If you can install the MSI with a MSI Transform file, then you could just make an MSI Transform to patch in the settings you need without modifying the original MSI. This is useful if you want to use different settings for different groups in the same company / environment, so you could use a single unmodified MSI but many MST files to go along with it. I think it might also be possible to take an MSI, apply the MST, and output a new MSI, so in this case, you could put all the changes you need in an MST but apply it to the BigFix MSI as new ones are released without the need to update the MST itself.
Here is an example of a fixlet that uses a custom MST that I created to change the values within an unmodified MSI during the install process: https://www.bigfix.me/fixlet/details/22636
This doesn’t really apply if you MUST use the MSI installer, but these scripts handle the configuration of the failover relay and more automatically:
- https://github.com/jgstew/tools/blob/master/powershell/install_bigfix.ps1
- https://github.com/jgstew/tools/blob/master/CMD/install_bigfix.bat
- https://github.com/jgstew/tools/blob/master/bash/install_bigfix.sh
These install scripts are missing some validation of the client downloads, but they extremely useful and how I install BigFix either by hand, or in automation that supports it… though they do require that the system they are run on have a working internet connection, which isn’t always a valid assumption.
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