I was thinking about this again recently.
I want to be able to force the client locally through the command line to do certain things without having to restart the client service. Some have already been discussed above, while others have not.
- Reload client settings (changed by another process)
- Poll for commands
- ForceRefresh
Some things can be triggered by having a policy action that has relevance that looks for a particular condition, and then the action runs and makes changes, but the problem with that is the client won’t be responsive to quick changes depending on the evaluation loop, quiet times, power save states, etc…
Some examples I can think of are wanting to have the BigFix client behave more aggressively when a VPN connection is made temporarily so that it can trigger communication that requires the VPN. This is another example: Automatically adjust BESClient settings when on battery power
One thing I also thought of is that you might not want it to be too simple for a command to affect the BigFix client directly. It could be that providing the Computer ID along with the command would make it harder to do without some knowledge.
The main issue with this request I see is that how do you tell the BES Client that is already running to do something through a command line? Probably needs some sort of API or other mechanism.
CC: @AlanM