For cases where we need to deploy scripts to multiple platforms, what are your strategies for which language? Offhand we could
How do you all approach this problem?
-Andrew
We largely (if not entirely) rely on BigFix Action Script to either do stuff that Action Script can do or write/copy a platform-specific file (bat/ps1 to Windows, shell to macOS). So, “parallel scripts”.
Would like to look into platform-agnostic scripting by deploying PowerShell to macOS and Linux, when I have the time…
I do the same in honesty…
If I know I’m doing Windows and Linux I’ll try do it all in Action Script if possible but if not I tend to just use the Windows file upload wizard and upload the bash / powershell scripts, gather the prefetch statements and then put them into the same fixlet with some os based relevance to be able to run them both.
Beyond that, I think Python is probably the easiest to work with in an agnostic way but obviously it’ll need installing on Windows.
My strategy is usually to use actionscript for everything where possible. If it can’t be done in actionscript then i honestly prefer to use createfile to write the powershell, bash, or batch file out to a text file and then run it locally from within action script rather than uploading the script from the console then downloading it on the client computer. There are sometimes where it might be better to upload the script just because of sheer size or complexity but for smaller scripts it make it quicker to manipulate the script or have the script get populated dynamically relevance substitution if it’s created within the actionscript.
Personally I’m not a big fan of installing python to use on end user machines, so I prefer to steer away from that most of the time.
We also use actionscript for most things.
For more specific/complex things, we’ve used PowerShell or 'nix bash, per the target platforms. Naturally, that requires enough expertise in both languages to achieve the objective. Sometimes we prefetch a canned script, sometimes we use createfile and inject relevance-derived local data.
That gets me thinking about the possibilities of only one language. Like y’all, I’m not keen on adding more middleware environments. (Adding PowerShell to 'nix/macOS, adding python to Windows, etc.)
Sounds like we’re all much the same.
Yeah It sounds like it. Several people I have worked with were happy to see native powershell getting added to BigFix 10 until they realized that they lost many of the benefits of using actionscript alongside it. That and you have to account for different versions of powershell, having the appropriate modules, account for devices where you can’t download the modules from the internet so you have to copy the modules to the machine before running it.