Problems with Microsoft SteadyState + Bigfix

(imported topic written by amagewick91)

We currently have Steadystate installed on a few of our machines, and I am seeing some strange behavior through bigfix that I cannot explain at this time. If we leave a machine turned on and logged in, nothing else, sometime between 12am and 1am every morning a new machine will show up in the console. This creates a lot of duplicates for this machine and the others that are doing it.

Also, if we reboot the machine it will put another computer in the console.

Not understanding the inner workings of steadystate and even bigfix, I really don’t know where to begin with this one. I don’t understand what would just magically change each morning without a config change or at least a reboot. Has anyone else seen anything like this before?

(imported comment written by MattBoyd)

I’ve never used Steadystate, but I can pretty much guarantee that the reason this is happening is because SteadyState is reverting all changes to the system state after reboots (and apparently around 1am nightly). When this happens, the client’s computer ID is probably removed, so it gets a new one from the BigFix server, which is why you’re seeing duplicate computers.

You’ll need to find a way to exclude the C:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise folder as well as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\BigFix Inc. from SteadyState.

Unfortunately, I have not worked with SteadyState so I don’t know how you would go about doing this.