Forced Reboots via BigFix

Content Authoring
21

Your scenario sounds common - issue multiple patch baselines with no post-action restart, leaving them in ‘pending restart’ status, and then send a follow-up single action to trigger the restart. A lot of us use a workflow like that and you should be able to get it working.

There are two different ways for an action to get into ‘pending restart’ state.

If you have an action that needed a restart to complete, i.e. the action contains action required restart "my patch update", but you did not configure a post-action restart, the action status will remain “pending restart” until the reboot occurs.

Likewise, if you configure a post-action restart in the action settings (or use the restart actionscript command), the status will be “pending restart” until the reboot occurs; and the bes client will trigger the restart user interface with the countdown options you specified.

One action’s “pending restart” action would not prevent you from sending other actions to restart the client. Exception: if the bes client is already trying to restart the system, it will not execute other actions. This is after any restart countdown timer, when the reboot should actually be happening.

I know of at least two conditions that can trigger a restart problem.

IF you use the post-action settings or ‘restart 180’ command, the client will try to launch the client UI to display the countdown timer. On Windows Core systems, or systems with logged-on but disconnected Remote Desktop sessions, the client may not trigger the restart because it cannot present the user interface. See Post-Action Restart problem for details and a client setting to handle that condition. I believe there was also something in the release notes of one of the recent client versions about restart handling on Server Core installations.

What version is your bes client, what version is your operating system, and are you running on core? Can you post entries from the client log where it is failing to restart?

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22

hello and thank you for your continuous help, yes it seems that the pending restart was in place not because of the current baseline but because other external situations. I just run the scenario with two different servers were the pending start was not true to start with, run the baseline and then the action and everything happen as it should.

I will test with more boxes and let you know, but it seems that is working.

thanks.

1 Like
23

Can anybody help me write the proper ActionScript which will mimic the UI generated by the PostAction tab when taking an action?

Example: I have a task which is simple: restart 180.
I put that into a baseline with some relevance to know when a restart is needed.

I’d like the ability to add to the ActionScript of the task so that a dialogue box is displayed giving an end user the ability to cancel the restart.

Right now if I push the baseline without defining anything on any tab when taking the action, they get a dialogue box with the ability to restart sooner than 3 minutes, and a countdown timer, but the “Cancel” button is greyed out so they cannot cancel the action.

Can I activate that cancel button somehow inside the ActionScript of the task?

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I use a right click option that force restarts when needed. The shell command is"shutdown -m \\"&hostname of current computer &" -r -f"