I need to get BES clients to download all relevant fixlets locally and force the install to happen later that night.
i.e. I have 1000 PCs being patched tomorrow and the ideal thing would be that when I send the action to patch they all download everything starting at 5:00 am in the morning and then do all installations after midnight. We have BF throttling the network at less than 5mbit/s and up to 50 at a time. If I send the action to start at 5am then they will start downloading and installing on a first come, first serve basis correct? I need them all to download everything through the day and only install in the off hours.
Any way to set this up? Looking at the options for the action start times they all seem to be start downloading and then install when finished. I need it with a deferred installation until a set time and date.
To get this to work properly, you would need to manually separate the built-in download/install Fixlet action to a two-part action: 1) download 2) install. You would have to do that for every patch that you were looking to apply.
Thank you Ben. I was in a hurry so I emailed Brolly33 this morning (he was my instructor) and he explained the same to me. While talking we came up with the idea to sort the updates by size and then change the action script on the ones with the bigger download size to something like:
download http://… (default)
Continue If {SHA1 AND SIZE} (default)
Continue If {DATE is such AND current time is >= TIME} (edit)
then set the “retry if failed” to certain number of retries and to check every so often to hit the set TIME. This way we send them in one action at an earlier time then send the ones that are small downloads at the defined DATE AND TIME. The catch is that the retries and the check time have to be set carefully not to overshoot the allowed change window. Obviously more complicated than simply doing two actions but since I just checked and I have about 400+ relevant fixlets…If I don’t want to duplicate the amount of actions running then this is an option.
Any way to include this kind of functionality on a future update? We cannot be the only ones that would love to have a “deferred” installation time option in the Action dialog, are we? It would also put “upgrading BigFix” project in a higher priority at least in my company.
Thank you again Ben for your prompt response, and of course Brolly33,
You could also use the File Pre-Cache Wizard which will create one action with all the download statements from the fixlets you select. This is normally intended just to pre-cache on the server and relays, but it will work on clients if you change the relevance to ‘true’ and the success criteria to ‘all lines of the action script have completed successfully.’
You will likely need to increase the download cache size on the client (default is 20MB) using the following client setting: _BESClient_Download_DownloadsCacheLimitMB
The problem with that method is that when you have about 629 relevant fixlets…you could call it a very lengthy process. Which is why the above methods were just not practical either.
The problem is that they give us a window to update and restart and if it’s not done then, too bad.
We have a similar issue. We have a 4 hour window and over slow wan links we do not always make it. It would be nice if there was an option to precache each fixlet or an entire baseline on the client. It could trickle over a period of days which would be great!
We are working on it… actually, we spent all last week debating the details of the feature and our current expectation is that it will make it into our next major release (probably will be version 8.0), but it won’t be out for a while…
The basics of the feature will be that you will have the ability to select an option in the “Take Action Dialog” when you create any action and the downloads will be transferred before the action runs… so you could schedule your action for tomorrow at midnight as Marlon suggested at the beginning of this thread and then the downloads would start and be ready for you (hopefully) by midnight…
There are lots of changes going into the next version so it will be a while longer… I guess we are sure it is not going to be in 2009 and probably will be the first half of 2010… but don’t quote me on it…
Now if I could only get us updated…we are still running 6. Even though we already have two servers to act as main and DR already installed with 7, but just cant get any commitment on deploying clients.
Either way kudos to you (BigFix) for listening to your customers.
Another feature you might want to look into is drag and drop report making so that you don’t have to be a webmaster and know BigFix session code to come up with a report. That just translates to one or two more people to hire to maintain one product which already has other admins.
Anyways, thank you very much for getting on this so quickly. Just to be sure, I’m not being sarcastic I understand about adding new features into a roadmap that was probably already mapped three years before and coming up with it in less than two years is awesome.
Cant wait to see it. I’m tired of copying to excel and formatting or running a SQL query that might not get me everything I need (or the right thing for that matter).
Do the start/execute/end time still apply to the “Start client download…”? If not is there anyway to control when the client will start this download? Ideally I would like to not have the download start before a specific time (say after 6:00pm so as not to put extra load on the network) but still also be able to control when the patches are also installed. Would this be possible with the starts on/run between?
Follow-up question… would this also apply to Offers? I would like to push out patches as offers but have it already cached so when the user accepts the offer all patches are already cached locally.
If you use that checkbox, the download will start when you sign the action, more or less; the action restriction times still apply to when the execution will start. The option applies to offers as well.