I was wondering if can be possible to use BigFix SSA in the following scenario:
Worker go to the office. Laptop connected to BigFix receives new offers. Start client downloads before constraints are satisfied.
The same laptop now in a home network, accept the offer, software is installed.
Is there any way to make it possible?
At the moment, when a offer is accepted (user click on install button) outside the corporate network the task never starts.
Is this for a client that has no access (via VPN/RAS or Internet facing relay)?
Hello @gfajunior,
can you try to use the option in the fixlet “Start client downloads before constraints are satisfied” and let us know?
Regards
If the user has VPN access there is no problem because the user have access to the corporate network where BigFix server is running.
The hole idea is that the user can install the software outside the corporate network or even without connection, once the client have already got the task and have downloaded the software for install, pending the user acceptance only.
In theory, once the task has been received while the laptop was connected to the corporate network, we would just need Internet connection if the software was downloaded through an external link.
Even using the “Start client downloads before constraints are satisfied” option, when the user click to accept the offer, it remains pending forever. It seems like when the user accept the offer the SSA wait for a comunication with server to effectively start the task.
I’ve tried both, using file downloaded from the server and directly from external links.
I’d have to test some scenarios, but I think you’re seeing an expected behavior.
“Offers” should not precache downloads until the user takes the offer; Offers are generally for “optional” software – if there are hundreds, or thousands, of offers we wouldn’t want to cache downloads for something the user may never ask for.
Maybe need to look into “normal” actions that have a “Display message before running” option instead of Offers? Or a DMZ Relay configuration so clients can reach a relay while off-VPN?
I agree, it really doesn’t make sense to have hundreds of optional softwares precached in a laptop. That would be a few exceptional cases because the main idea would be using Internet links to download the softwares, so the task would be “precached” waiting for user acceptance.
It would be something like a BigFix task to update/install Mozilla Firefox, for instance, where the Firefox current version is downloaded directly from an external link on the Internet, but turned into an offer, where the user can install/update a software even if he/she stays for a few days way from the office.
Is there a reason you don’t have an Internet facing Relay that the clients can use as a Failover Relay?
I would say the reason is that I didn’t even know it would be possible.
Would you please tell me how I can reach it or where I can read more about this?
This should help https://help.hcltechsw.com/bigfix/9.5/platform/Platform/Installation/c_relays.html
Also, look back through the forum - there were quite a lot of posts on this subject in the 2nd quarter of 2020.
I’ll take a look and see if we can achieve what we want this way. I’m pretty confident now that it will be possible.
Thank you all for your collaboration.