The BigFix client is installed on a Linux computer and is not starting. It is not getting to the point where it produces anything in its own log; /etc/inid.d/besclient start simply returns FAILED.
I looked in the forum for older instances of this; one in particular had the masthead file name misspelled and fixing that resolved the issue.
Since I don’t have direct access to the computer in question, I’ve requested verification that the masthead file is in /etc/opt/BESClient, that is called actionsite.afxm (in all lower case) and that it is the right masthead (pointing to the expected BigFix server).
Also, on this machine, the command rpm -qa | grep -i bes returns BESAgent-9.2.6.94-rhe5 but on most other Linux machines the command returns BESAgent-9.2.6.94-rhe5.x86_64. The same install image was used. Is there a difference i.e. is the first one 32-bit and the second one 64-bit?
Have any of you seen a similar issue where the BigFix client did not start at all? Are there other things I should be looking at besides what I listed above?
It is a good idea to investigate the masthead and similar things, but assuming everything checks out, then I would probably recommend downloading the client on this machine from here: http://support.bigfix.com/bes/release/ and installing it again.
Another option would be to try version 9.2.5.130 to see if it works. It is okay if this doesn’t match the root server version. The ideal case is that all version of the components match, but it is not completely required.
The error you posted indicates that it is a 64-bit kernel they are running and it seems that the 32-bit version of the agent was installed. The system may be missing one or more 32-bit libraries or even have no support for 32-bit ELF binaries at all. I would suggest that they try to install the 64-bit version of the agent.
The following command shows if the package is 32-bit (i386, i686 or similar) or 64-bit (x86_64)
rpm -q --qf ‘%{ARCH}\n’ BESAgent
I am not 100% sure that you get these kind of errors due to missing 32-bit support, but I recall having seen something similar like this in the past.
HTH,
Chris
Software Engineer - IBM BigFix Remote Control
More specifically you should not run a 32 bit agent on a 64 bit UNIX install. The builds are unique and it should have prevented you from installing it (we do an architecture check in the RPM install)
Based on the comments above, I was able to resolve the issue.
There were several reasons why this was happening:
Tried to run the 64-bit BES Client on a 32-bit operating system
The operating system was old and the current version of the BES Client did not support that operating system.
For one server, the masthead file was missing
Oddly enough, we weren’t prevented from installing the wrong client; we just couldn’t run it. I think we were given an error message about installing the wrong client only once and I don’t remember the flavor of Unix that was.
If you have any details I’d definitely like to know. Our installs are designed to stop you from doing this but there may be some misses so it would be helpful to know the platforms