Hello BigFix’ers, please review and vote up my RFE to introduce a WatchDog service for the BESClient. This would be a secondary, back-end service to monitor the health and functionality of the BESClient.
Another thing I would suggest as a “fix” is to “reset the BES Client Content” by stopping the BES Client, deleting the contents of the __BESData folder and restarting the Client. This triggers the client to re-download all the Fixlets/Tasks/Analyses.
I’ve written a Task to do this under Windows but have not taken the time to generalize it to other OS’s yet.
It should be noted that we have such a service for Windows-based BigFix Clients (referred to as the Client Helper - http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21506091). It seems the request here is to perhaps extend its support to other OS platforms.
To me, a WatchDog should be be external service to the BESClient and provide more than simple up/down monitoring. This WatchDog service should help monitor the general health of the local BESClient installation and when/where possible take corrective action. It should also prevent users with elevated permissions from disabling or otherwise tampering with the BESClient installation.
I think with the BESClient compliance API this should be relatively possible.
Finally, I can provide specific NIX use case details if you’re interested.
Thanks for the additional context. It would be worth discussing the *nix-specific use cases. That said, the Client Helper is in fact an external service to the BigFix Client, and does take a number of corrective actions (including deleting the contents of the __BESClient folder as a last resort per @TimRice’s suggestion above).
Upvoted as well. Definitely have a need for this for our growing Linux environment where we need to periodically restart our clients as they seem to stop themselves though appear running. (and/or people stopping the client as mentioned above)
What version of the BESClient on NIX? There was a known issue with the “lines of file” inspector in 9.5.x versions that I’ve seen leave the BESClient hung/non-responsive but show status as running.
Issue 138234 - APAR IV93412 - SLOW EVALUATION CYCLE FOR CLIENTS 9.5.X WHEN USING “LINES OF FILE” INSPECTOR
We’re at 9.5.8.38…that APAR was suspected earlier this year when I had a support case open, but was not the case. Isn’t a horrible issue in my environment but we still have a handful every month.