My scenario is that when we have a new remote office set up we install BigFix on a windows server and use a baseline to turn that into a relay and configure other settings. Then we normally manually create an automatic group in another custom site so that user pc’s in that office get added to that site’s group. The pc naming convention is such that the name includes the location (ex. mypc1-locationA) so the group is joined by pc’s with that ending in the name (-locationA).
Is it possible to create a fixlet that creates the automatic group as part of the baseline for the server setup? I’m not sure if a fixlet can do admin-type tasks within BigFix itself or not.
There is no action script command that can create content.
The only “external” way to achieve that is by using the REST API:
https://developer.bigfix.com/rest-api/api/computergroup.html
You can prepare an XML with the wanted group and then using a REST client like curl you can run post the request and create the group.
Then using an execution command in the action script ( like wait for example ) you can run the REST client which in turn create the group.
https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/reference/execution/
A baseline runs everything on one computer.
So you might consider using the Server Automation that comes in BigFix Lifecycle.
That allows you run different things on different computers and customers do use that to do sophisticated provisioning.
For example:
- Run your Fixlets to create the remote office server (on your new server)
- Run a Fixlet to create the automatic group (you could run this on your root server).