Subscribing Computers to Patches for Unix/Linux

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by murtasma91)

Currently in our deployment all computers are subscribed to the following sites provided by BigFix.

Patches for AIX

Patches for ESX

Patches for HP-UX

Patches for RedHat Enterprise Linux

Patches for RedHat Linux

Patches for Solaris

Patches for Solaris Maintenance

Patches for SUSELinux Enterprise

After reviewing how many linux/unix endpoints we have I discovered we currently only have 3 end points (14,000+ Windows/Mac machines)

Have any other BigFix customers changed the default behavior of these sites to subscribe computers based on the retereived preoprty OS instead of just all computers? To me it seems like a waste having 14,000 machines syncs against these sites when we only have 3 end points that may actually be relevant to the content inside them. Would there be a performance improvement if I changed the computer subscriptions for these sites? I’m almost tempted to unscubscribe from since no content related to the patches contained in these sites has ever been sent out to those 3 end points in almost 2 years.

2

(imported comment written by MrFixit)

We made that change when we went to 7.2. It does reduce the amount of content that has to be mirrored to each system, and therefore benefits all around.

Biggest benefit was to the UNIX systems as the content is much less than all of the windows stuff that we have.

3

(imported comment written by jeremylam)

Many of those sites contain a feature called site-level relevance, which restricts Clients from downloading and evaluating the Fixlet content within the site if the Client does not evaluate the site-level relevance as true. This was done to optimize diskspace but I’m sure there are also performance benefits.

Ben wrote more information when this feature was being introduced to our products:

http://forum.bigfix.com/viewtopic.php?pid=10953#p10953