I’m going to build a retrieved property to identify and group workstations with Faronics Deepfreeze on them. I would like to be able to patch pc’s with Deepfreeze - Not installed wholesale and treat the Deepfreeze - Installed stations differently.
I think I can check to see if Deepfreeze is a registered app but I would like to take it one step further to see if the pc’s are in a frozen state or not.
There is a way to execute \SERVER\SHARE\FOLDER\DFC.EXE get /ISFROZEN but I’m wondering if this is a lot of overhead.
ERRORLEVEL 1 as a result basically means it’s in a “frozen” state
ERRORLEVEL 0 as a result means it’s “thawed”
The frozen and thawed state always happens with a reboot so my retrieved property would also have to be at reboot to detect the changed state.
The Deepfreeze program works great to lock old 98 pc’s, etc into a frozen state but gets in the way of our patching, etc. I’m not sure if you are in contact with Faronics to see if there is a more efficient way to check the state of the pc.
Many of our customers appear to be using DeepFreeze (especially our education customers) and we see the same problems you mentioned often:
If you change the computer state with BES (patches, updates, security changes, etc.), DeepFreeze will change it back on restart, which is annoying.
DeepFreeze mucks with the BES Client registry state information on every restart which causes the BES Client to reset itself and appear as a duplicate in the BES Console. Again it is an annoyance, but it could lead to problems (see Alida Gage’s issue with her server running out of disk space: http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?id=451).
I have spoken with engineers at Faronics myself and we told them how to address the issues. They had a plan to eliminate both issues by automatically locking/unlocking the agent based on the frozen/thawed state (which they would write to the registry). They also had a plan to make sure not to cause the client to reset by restoring its previous state on bootup.
I don’t know much about what happened after our discussion, but I suggest that you contact them and ask for more information. I will try to get my Faronics contact to post a message here so we can get more information.
For your specific question, the shared folder would need to be a null session share (it would be better to put the dfc.exe app locally on the agents and they can run it). You will then need to write the errorlevel to a file or registry key because the agent won’t know the return code (we try to avoid return codes as methods to communicate information because our experiences and our customer’s comments confirm that there are lots of issues with return codes – however this sometimes sparks controversy).
I’ll try to follow up with them as it seems it would be a minor change on their part to solve problems for everyone. Their recommendation of stopping the Bes client service doesn’t work for me. If I have to choose I’ll keep Bigfix and stop using Deepfreeze where possible.
I’ll start with the checks to see if it installed as registered app and go from there…
don’t know much about what happened after our discussion, but I suggest that you contact them and ask for more information. I will try to get my Faronics contact to post a message here so we can get more information.
We have also been using both Deepfreeze and BES together and I have on the server (thanks to some info from rdamours) a couple scheduled tasks - one to delete duplicates every 30 min, one to remove expired clients every 21 days, and one to remove the deleted computers from the SQL DB once a week. This keeps things fairly clean - but our biggest issue is the licensing…
We currently have 160 licenses for BES. I was told that each client generates a new license key every 24hrs and stores it in the registry. If a client re-registers because of this new key, one might be for example, license 25/160 and the next time it’s rebooted, because it’s duplicated due to Deepfreeze and a new key being generated, might end up with license 170/160 - putting us over our limit and unable to push out any tasks to those clients.
I used the following property to show me the current BES Client License state of each client (found this somewhere in the forums):
seat count state of client license as string & " - " & seat of client license as string & “/” & maximum seat count of client license as string
So far, I have no solution to this without Deepfreeze being able to exclude registry keys or folders. As stated above by another user; Faronics’ solution of having the bes service stopped while the machine is frozen is not an option for us, as we need both.
I will definitely post if I find a solution, and hope maybe someone else out there might come up with something too. Please Help!
Thats a tough situation… I imagine we could try to engineer a solution to this either from the Faronics or BigFix side of things, but we do worry about making changes in our licensing behavior that might make it easier for people to defeat the licensing controls.
I think maybe the best solution will be to try to work out a deal with your salesperson so that you can get some extra licenses to deal with this issue… Remember that you have a 10% “grace” set of licenses.