Need help with precaching

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by SystemAdmin)

Hello,

I am having trouble understanding precaching mechanism in BigFix. Every patch cycle (patch Tuesday), we precache all available updates before creating baselines and sending them out. Yet, actual patching process takes a fairly long time, and we see the following in the client logs:

At 12:54:57 -0400 -

DownloadsAvailable: checking for ‘http://xxx.com:443/bfmirror/downloads/60452/0’

DownloadsAvailable: false (action id 60452)

At 13:04:59 -0400 -

DownloadsAvailable: checking for ‘http://xxx.com:443/bfmirror/downloads/60452/0’

DownloadsAvailable: true (action id 60452)

DownloadsAvailable: checking for ‘http://xxx.com:443/bfmirror/downloads/60452/0’

DownloadsAvailable: true (action id 60452)

ActionLogMessage: (action 60452 ) Non-Distributed - DownloadsAvailable

ActionLogMessage: (action 60452 ) Submitting download request

ActionLogMessage: (action 60452 ) Download url: 'http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/A/5/8A5F33C3-54E5-468C-B391-B9B6E7BFCCAE/Windows6.1-KB2475792-x86.msu

This goes on for almost every patch in the baseline – client is looking for a file on relay and sees that it’s not there (DownloadsAvailable: false), waits for 10 minutes (it’s always 10-minute wait window) and then DownloadsAvailable becomes true and it looks like it’s downloading it from Microsoft. I’m not sure about the last part, maybe it’s just a log message, but I’m still at a loss why if all patches were precached beforehand, clients are not seeing them on the relays and are forced to wait until each patch is downloaded.

Is it possible that relays are running some kind of purge to free up space? I apologize if this is too novice of the question, but I couldn’t find anything definitive in the admin guide.

Thanks,

Dimitri

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Dmitri,

The agent requests the file from the relay and if the relay doesn’t have the file yet (or if it has in its cache but this is first agent that has asked about the action id), then it will prepare the file in the action folder. The agent will wait 10 minutes to check again for the file. The relay is supposed to send a UDP message when the file is ready (but it doesn’t look like the agent received it in this case).

How are you pre-caching the files?

Ben

3

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

Hi Ben,

Thank you for replying. We precache files via File Precaching Wizzard in BigFix, selecting all patches for that month and applying that action to ALL BIGFIX SERVERS group that contains all of our relays. It always succeeds, and I can actually see each relay downloading the files in “Show Action Info” portion.

When you’re saying relay is sending a UDP message, is this an inbound connection to the client from the relay? We don’t have incoming BF traffic allowed to the client; instead clients are checking in every 4 hours automatically, but it really is a one-way client to server communication. Could this be the case?

Thanks again,

Dimitri

4

I’m having the same behavior, is it possible to change the 10 default minutes to a lower number? Thanks in advance.

5

I believe you are lookin gone the __BESClient_Download_RetryMinutes setting.

You can read about this setting, and many more at the IBM BigFix Configuration Settings page.