The number of PCs that BigFix can see seems to have dropped down about 1000 since last week in our environment. After checking one of the affected PCs I saw that the service is not running, there are no files under the BES Client folder except for a log, and it still shows as installed on Add and Remove Programs. What could be causing this issue or where can I look for more information (log) of what happened? I had seen this before and was simply fixed by re-installing it. The problem is that 1000 PCs are not so easily found and I want to hopefully prevent that from happening to any other. Up to this moment the odd one or two PCs was not a big deal but if this is the reason for all of them to disappear off BigFix then it’s a major problem for us.
I don’t think we have any known issue that would cause the files to disappear… Is the BESClient.exe there?
Might there be something that is running and removing your system? You can check the BigFix log to see if BigFix is maybe running an action that might be related to this issue… Or maybe do you have another tool like Active Directory or some other software distribution tool that is maybe trying to re-deploy the BigFix Agent accidentally and causing a problem?
Deployed by GPO. All executables are gone from those machines. The log shows that no actions happened before the service was shut down by an external action (read someone or some software). Kevin McManamon from BF is working with us on this though. I’m looking into the GPO maybe doing an unclean uninstall due to the “Uninstall if it goes out of scope of management” setting.
One of our customers used GPO to deploy BigFix and apparently the GPO install package ran if the add/remove program string wasn’t in the registry, which worked fine… but then later, they used the “Hide BigFix Client from Add/Remove Programs” Task and then it triggered GPO to redeploy, which caused issues…
We decided to add a script in front of the GPO which checks if the uninstall key is there and then checks for the icon file inside BigFix Client folder (which was some of the few entries left in a PC with this problem) if the file doesnt exist it will delete the key and then when the Install GPO executes everything will be fine. We still havent figured out why some of them just seem to do a dirty uninstall/delete. Thats next after we fix those PCs.
Thank you,
Marlon
edit: We think that because the GPO has a checkbox in it to uninstall if it goes out of scope it uninstalls it but keeps in the registry the history of the GPO being applied already. It seems once the machine joins the domain back again it doesn’t install it because of that history. Still dont know why it seems those machines were falling out of scope of the whole domain since it’s a domain policy.