(imported topic written by tgxwtso91)
Within the BES Console, when I r click and ‘Send Refresh’ to a computer it really doesnt seem to do much. Is there a command line I can run on the workstation locally to force the agent to talk to the server?
(imported comment written by JasonO91)
tgxwtso,
Generally the client automatically tries to contact the server. If the client isn’t reporting into its relay or the server, then I would check a few things on the client.
Is the BigFix Agent service running on the client?
Can the client access the root server on the BigFix port? You can test this by trying to get a piece of information from the root server such as the masthead file. eg: http://servername:port/masthead/masthead.afxm (usually http://bigfixserver:52311/masthead/masthead.afxm)
If yes to both of these, then I would look in the Logs directory (__BESData/__Global/Logs) and then look for a file with today’s date and open it. This will usually give you some idea as to why it’s not able to communicate with the server.
Jason
(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)
If your agents look like they are doing okay, you will also want to take a look at its relay to make sure it is functioning properly. I was pulling my hair out the other week because a fixlet I knew was relevant on a particular machine was not saying it was in the console. The client looked fine, but when it went to gather it wasn’t receiving anything new. Turns out there were disk errors on the relay and it wasn’t functioning properly because of it. Just something to keep in mind when troubleshooting.
(imported comment written by peterd91)
tgxwtso, is there any particular reason you want to force refresh the agent?
The ‘Send Refresh’ from the console will send UDP network packet to the agent, but if there is any firewall blocking UPD 52311 the agent will not receive it.
You can force refresh the agent by taking custom action with the below action script, but if a firewall is blocking the two-way communication between the client and the server, the action will taken by the agent at the next gather interval (the default is one day, configurable in the masthead)
notify client forcerefresh
If you have console access to the client, you can restart the BES Client service from services.msc which will force it to connect to the server and do the gather immediately (you can do this also with a dos command -
net stop besclient
then
net start besclient
).
The force refresh sometimes is required if you have properties in the console, as explained in KB312 here:
http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=312
Hope this helps,
Peter
(imported comment written by tgxwtso91)
The client reports in fine. It just take about 15 minutes for a machine to check in and execute any jobs. I have a task that I create/edit. I would like to force the client to checkin and run the task w/o waiting the 15 minutes or so. Stopping/Starting the service did not give me any different results.
(imported comment written by peterd91)
tgxwtso, when you say the client reports in fine, you probably refer to the heartbeat, but it is the gathering when the client will check for any new actions. The client restart will force the gather, but if it still doesn’t change anything, then there could be other issues with this installation. Do you have any other machines that experience the same behavior? Is the communication going through relay or directy to the bes server?
Can you try to clean reinstall the client using the besremove tool (http://software.bigfix.com/download/bes/72/BESRemove-7.2.4.60.exe) and see if still the same issue?
You can also investigate the client log for any errors, as Jason suggested.
Cheers,
Peter
(imported comment written by BenKus)
Hey tgxwtso,
If your agents are slow to respond, it is usually because it has a lot of work with very large baseline actions… You should check the health-checks dashboard to try to figure out if there is anything obviously wrong… You might also consider getting one of our services guys to take a look at the overall health of your system and try optimize it for you… See “Optimization Service” at http://support.bigfix.com/services/
Ben