Need help on creating a fixlet that will send files without checking for sha1 and sha256

Hello,

Is it possible to create a fixle/task that grabs a file from a specific link which is updated weekly or daily and send it to clients from time to time?

What I mean by this is that we need to distribute a file to our clients and update this software, but it is a software that updates every day, so we always have that job of calculating the sha1, size and sha256 to then send it to clients.

We already know we can trust the file and link, my idea is to send it directly to clients like a policy, making it download the file everyday or every two days and update the clients.

Is it somehow possible? Any thoughts on this?

Thank you.

https://developer.bigfix.com/action-script/reference/download/download.html

Check ID 1516: Switch BES Client Action Site Masthead as an example to download file using download command

Download command can be used anywhere in the fixlet, but to enable pre-fetching of the file check out using the nohash-prefetch-item.

add nohash prefetch item | BigFix Developer

I think there maybe a risk to using download to distribute a file that may change regularly and you could find yourself in a situation that endpoints will not get their local copies updated.

If you have a fixlet when the file is at say version 1.0 and deploy that fixlet while the file being downloaded is at 1.0, that would be the version that gets cached on relays and its sha associated with that action ID. When the file changes to say 1.1, the action will still know that action x is linked to file with a sha of the file as it was when the action was deployed and if that file still exists on relays, or in the local __Download folder, the endpoint will still receive the 1.0 version.

Maybe this is avoided using the nohash prefetch item, but I pretty sure using download and letting the same action rerun on an interval, you will see mixed results. Certainly in my LAB, my test machnes only get the version of the file as it was when the action was first issued, not the updated copy that exists on the remote URL.

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This is totally correct, and applies to both ‘download’ and ‘prefetch’

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