Manual installation of BES Helper service

1

Hello All,

We are having a bunch of Workstations (2000+) which are not reporting from 10th May 2016. We are able to ping all the workstations but the workstations are grayed out in IBM Bigfix Console.

We are having a hard feeling that BES Client service must not be running because of that Workstations are not reporting.
We have proposed a Plan to customer that we need to install BES Helper service which will restart the IBM Bigfix client automatically if it is not running and Customer has agreed to our proposal.

We are going to push BES Helper service setup file from different tool but how to install it.Is there any command which will install this particular application.

We tried below command to install the .exe file but BES Helper service we are not able to see in services.msc window

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Please help need command to install BES Helper service.

2

@Seiko1 you can use Drive name followed by the command. Please see the below example:-

Open command prompt and type the below command

D:>start /b /w “BESClientHelper.exe”

This command will run the BES Client Helper.exe file and you can see the service “BES Client helper” running.

3

Why not just use the other tool to run

Net start besclient

And see if the issue is actually stopped clients and not something else?

4

Try:

BESClientHelper.exe -install auto

5

Sometimes, feelings are not true and enough.

I would check the BigFix Clients Logs and see if you there is something, also check communications and BigFix Infrastructure. If the service is not started then something is affecting the Clients and is causing the problem, but you have to verify it, before apply a ‘solution’.

6

@strawgate I think the way you suggested is good but think like if again BES Client service is stopped by human intervention then again we can’t use the other tool to restart the BES Client services. For that reason we thought of installing BES helper service. First we will test this out on few of the workstation and if it work then we are going to implement on all the workstation.Please suggest if my understanding right or not.

@fermt we don’t have access to any of the workstations and we are not supposed to engage desktop team for this troubleshooting.So,it quite difficult to get the client log file.

7

Installing the client helper service fixes the symptom but it doesn’t address the root issue or it’s cause. Why are all these clients online but the besclient service isn’t working?

You need to figure out why it’s happening and then implement a solution, if you skip figuring out why it’s happening you’re opening yourself up to a world of troubleshooting hell later on. Bandaids don’t fix bullet holes – when you live like that you live with ghosts.

If the other tool can run a script all you need to do is run (with the other tool):

net start besclient
sc config besclient start=auto

Which will start the besclient and configure the service to start on startup…

If you’re interested I have a client health script here

Which you can call with:

& .\clienthealth.ps1 -masthead http://yourdmzrelay:52311/masthead/masthead.afxm

Which will start the client if it’s stopped, set the client service to auto start, finally it will clean remove and reinstall broken clients.