Pending Restart

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by TommyG91)

I have had BigFix in place for about two months now. When I first started, I noticed many clients would not reboot, they just stuck in a “pending restart” status. I was told that BigFix doesn’t know exactly WHY this happens, and that I could set up the “SkipVoluntaryOnForceShutdown” hack to fix this problem. I did do that, but I’ve noticed something. I just used the action to restart 28 computers. I left the “set deadline” at 1day. 22 of the 28 computers restarted fine. The other 6, were stuck at pending restart. I don’t understand why some would behave differently, but next time, I will set the deadline to one minute. A few questions:

  1. Can I set the default to “1 minute” instead of “1day”?

  2. Anyone know why they would behave differently?

  3. One other thing I’ve noticed. After the reboot, the hosts come back up, but it takes 30 minutes of the host behing online, before the “pending restart” goes to Complete. How can I speed up the “status”?

Thanks

Tom

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hi Tom,

Can you verify the version you are using? BigFix 7.2.4.60 fixed a large number of BESClientUI issues that could have led to computers not restarting properly…

Answers:

  1. Sure… Use the “Presets” at the top of the “Take Action Dialog” to store whatever values you want.

  2. The restart behavior is different based on if a user is logged in or not…

  3. This time will vary based on characteristics of the agent (# Fixlets, actions, properties, etc.) and the computer (CPU, RAM, etc.) Basiclly the agent will want to check all its Fixlets/actions before it reports, but since startup time is a busy time for a computer, it doesn’t want to aggressively spend resources so it can take a little while sometimes… The only way to speed this up is to have the agent use more CPU and I am not sure if you want to do that… You can always right-click force restart to make it go faster if you happen to be sitting and watching the system… also, CTRL-SHIFT-P will ping the computer so you can see when it is on…

Ben

3

(imported comment written by TommyG91)

TommyG

  1. Can I set the default to “1 minute” instead of “1day”?

Thanks Ben. What I meant by this is… I want to set this up as the DEFAULT. My problem is I forget to change this to one minute when I reboot computers. Right now, the default is 1 day.

I also want to set the default on “distribute over X minutes” to 5 minutes. Possible?

4

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Try saving an action preset called “default”…

It seems to work for me and I am not sure if this is intended behavior or a horrible hack that will bite me later… :slight_smile:

Ben