OS X Yosemite (10.10) 13FileItemError

Usage and Config Platform
1

Hi All,

We’ve recently become aware of a reoccurring issue on a percentage of our Mac systems managed with IEM. Reported initially by one of our users, who seems to have it happen more than others, the BESAgent logs contains the following lines:

Unhandled error: File error "13FileItemError" on "/Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist"
Client shutdown (Unexpected error)

When this occurs the BESAgent restarts itself, causing issues with tasks and baselines that may have been running.

Clients are running BESAgent 9.0.835.0 and either 10.10.0 or 10.10.1. As I stated earlier, only about 15% of the Yosemite Macs ever have this error, and even less of a percentage of people reporting the problem. We created an analysis using the following relevance to check the logs for this error:

(number of lines whose (it contains “13FileItemError” AND it contains “com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist”) of files whose( exists (name of it as lowercase) whose(it ends with “.log” OR it ends with “.bkg”) ) of folder “/Library/Application Support/BigFix/BES Agent/__BESData/__Global/Logs”)

Google returns ZERO results, has anyone else had issues with Mavericks and BESAgent? If you try the relevance above, do you find any results?

We’re testing the 9.1 client with 10.10+ now, BESAgent-9.1.1117.0-BigFix_MacOSX10.6.pkg, and will report any findings soon.

Is there an official BESAgent client that supports Yosemite?

Thanks,
Rusty Myers

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2

Here is the relevance above in an analysis:

BES Client Info - Mac http://bigfix.me/analysis/details/2994752

Right now the analysis is spartan, but I intend to expand it with Mac specific BES Client content in the future. This Analysis is meant to be used in conjunction with:

BES Client Info - Universal http://bigfix.me/analysis/details/2994718

3

No official announcement yet, but I haven’t seen this error on my Yosemite machine but of course if you’re only having a small percentage…

Do you have any kind of virus scanner or anything on that machine?
The error suggests that it is unable to open the plist so I’m wondering if something it touching the file unexpectedly

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4

I have opened a defect (internal number 65732) to track this. It might be helpful if you contacted support and could supply a log example of what is going on.

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5

Alan, thanks for the reply. I had our colleague test their deployment without Symantec and he reported no errors in the BESAgent log. I’m hopeful this was the cause.

We’re updating the Symantec task to a Yosemite compatible version and will be testing that soon.

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6

It’s been reported that the errors continue even without Anti-Virus installed. I asked the admin to run fs_usage while the BESAgent was running their baseline and here are some interesting findings, but not necessarily indicators of the problem:

11:56:00  getattrlist       /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist                                   0.000010   BESAgent    
11:56:00  getattrlist       /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist                                   0.000009   BESAgent    
11:56:01  open              /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.aQ4ZRBp                           0.584461 W cfprefsd    
11:56:01  open              /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.aQ4ZRBp                           0.000017   cfprefsd    
11:56:14  lstat64           /Users/macadmin/Library/Caches/com.bigfix.BESClientUI                            0.000035   fseventsd   
11:56:14  stat64            /Users/macadmin/Library/Caches/com.bigfix.BESClientUI/Cache.db                   0.000027   nsurlstorage
11:56:15  lstat64           /Users/macadmin/Library/Caches/com.bigfix.BESClientUI                            0.000043   fseventsd   
11:56:15  lstat64           /Users/macadmin/Library/Caches/com.bigfix.BESClientUI/Cache.db-shm               0.000007   fseventsd   
11:56:23  open              /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.VNwFKk6                           0.000111   cfprefsd    
11:56:23  open              /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.VNwFKk6                           0.000016   cfprefsd    
11:56:23  rename            /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.VNwFKk6                           0.000171 W cfprefsd    
11:56:23  open              /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.2QS0q2P                           0.000063   cfprefsd    
11:56:23  open              /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.2QS0q2P                           0.000013   cfprefsd    
11:56:23  rename            /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.2QS0q2P                           0.000140   cfprefsd    
11:56:24  lstat64           /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.VNwFKk6                           0.000014   fseventsd   
11:56:24  lstat64           /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist.2QS0q2P                           0.000008   fseventsd   
11:56:24  lstat64           /Library/Preferences/com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist                                   0.000013   fseventsd

We see the BESAgent accessing the com.bigfix.BESAgent.plist file, then we see the cfprefsd process open a temporary file. I’d like to send additional logs to support, where should I send them?

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7

It would be best to contact support and make sure they are aware of the bug number 65732 to attach the content to

8

The 9.2 Patch 4 Mac agent contains a fix for this issue.

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