Relevance for Post-Action

(imported topic written by brian.armstrong91)

I am wondering if there is a way to use Relevance for the Post-Action commands. Here is my situation. When doing large deployments at night we schedule the computers to turn off after the Task or Fixlet is complete in order to conserve energy. The issue is that some of the computers need to be left on for various reasons. I would like to be able to build some relevance into the Post-Action shutdown to exclude these computers. I have yet to find a way to do this in one Action. As far as I can tell, I either have to tell ALL of the computers to shutdown or NONE.

As a workaround to this, I have created a separate task that does nothing but shut down the computers which contains relevance to exclude these computers. I schedule this task to run an hour after the primary Task was set to run assuming it had enough time to finish. This is not an ideal solution though because at times I have included computers in my shutdown task that didn’t receive the primary Task thus shutting down computers I didn’t mean to. This also means that I have to guess how long it will take for the primary task to complete before sending the shutdown task.

Another option I thought of is to use an Action script to execute the shutdown and use relevance in the script to exclude the “Do Not Shutdown” computers. This would allow me to do everything in one Action. The issue with this however is that this option doesn’t provide the user any option to cancel the shutdown without creating my own shutdown script that mimics the BigFix shutdown dialog. Since we have some stations that have staff at them 24/7, this isn’t an ideal solution either.

I have created a Computer Group called “Do Not Shutdown” for the computers that are to be left on so generating relevance to exclude them is fairly simple.

Anybody have any ideas? Thanks in advance for any help that is provided.

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Hey Brian,

Your approach with the separate Task sounds like a good idea… How about you put your Shutoff Task in a Baseline with your other actions and put the shutoff Task last.

So the way this will work is that the Agent will run through the actions in the baseline and the last thing it will do is run the shutoff task which will check to see if it is supposed to turn off the system and if it is relevant, it will shut off the computer (otherwise do nothing)…

Ben

(imported comment written by brian.armstrong91)

Ben,

I like that idea. I thought of that as well late last night while I was sitting at home. I think it will accomplish what I want to do. It will solve my problem of runing two sperate actions and having to guess how long it will take to complete. It still would be nice to process all of this in one task though instead of having to generate a special baseline for it. Having the ability to put relevance in the Post-Action section would be helpful. Could this be added as a feature request?

You’ve always been able to supply good ideas. Keep up the good work!

Thanks,

Brian

(imported comment written by BenKus)

You can always add to the end of your actionscript:

IF {relevance}

restart 120

ENDIF

But I think the two separate actions probably will work best…

Ben