We have created some new (and very cool) Fixlets to help BES users deal with the common pain of restarts.
In BES 5.1 and below, the “Pending Restart” inspector for Windows looked in the registry “PendingFileRenameOperations” to see if the computer needed a restart (see http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=396 for more details). Any restart (BES related or not) would trigger this behavior. This led to some annoyances because computers need restarts for lots of reasons (installs of apps, uninstalls, broken apps, etc) and sometimes you want to know the difference between “critical restarts” (restarts that computers need because a patch was installed by BES) and other types of restarts that tend to be less critical.
Starting now (with BES 6.0+ agents), the BES Clients can distinguish between these two types of restarts.
The new “Restart Needed” Fixlet messages:
ID 177 Restart Needed
ID 390 Restart Needed - Triggered by a BES Action
ID 391 Restart Needed - Not Triggered by a BES Action
If a BES action triggered a restart, Fixlets 177 & 390 will be relevant.
If the restart is needed for another reason (unrelated to BES), Fixlets 177 & 391 will be relevant.
Fixlet ID 177 “Restart Needed” is the “master restart Fixlet” by which we mean that any computer that needs a restart will have Fixlet 177 relevant. The other two Fixlets are “subsets”.
To state slightly differently:
(# computers relevant for 390) + (# computers relevant for 391) = (# computers relevant for 177)
I should have noted that my formula assumes all BES 6.0+ agents:
(# computers relevant for 390) + (# computers relevant for 391) = (# computers relevant for 177)
Pre-6.0 agents can be relevant for 390/391, but they will definitely relevant for 177… So my guess is that you have 3 BES 5.1 Clients reporting relevant to “Restart Needed (id:177)”.
I should have noted that my formula assumes all BES 6.0+ agents:
(# computers relevant for 390) + (# computers relevant for 391) = (# computers relevant for 177)
Pre-6.0 agents can be relevant for 390/391, but they will definitely relevant for 177… So my guess is that you have 3 BES 5.1 Clients reporting relevant to “Restart Needed (id:177)”.
Ben
Nope. All 6.x clients! But I believe it is being caused by clients that have not reported in in awhile. Thanks!
I’m not sure if this is the case, but I have informed BigFix about this. Since these actions have been introduced, I am noticing that the job is not actually completing for some of my clients (many of them and it is OS independent). The job is deployed, yet the action shows as either Pending Message or Waiting. If you look at the logs, it accepts the Action and according to the logs, completes the action successfully, yet the PC does not get rebooted.
I have a problem with users that are logged in, deploying the fixlet will notify them but not force the restart. I have tried different options such as force after a minute, disallow postponement. I have noticed that after I upgraded everyone to 6.0.20 the bes client did not communicate with the server properly until the service was restarted or computer rebooted. Now whenever I try to restart computers it sits at pending message. I have tried to deploy from all 3 fixlets with the same results.