(imported topic written by BenKus)
Sometimes you want certain Fixlets/Tasks actions to run periodically using the reapply and “Wait between” options in BigFix Take Action Dialog and you may notice that certain versions of BigFix behave differently.
As an example, you might want to set a custom Task that writes out the command “netstat” to a file nightly so you can use relevance to examine the results.
In general, the way to do this would be to make a Task with relevance of
name of operating system = “Win”
(or something like that) with an action command to run
waithidden cmd.exe /C netstat > C:\netstat.log
. Then you would take the action from this Task to run at 9pm, choose wait 24 hours before reapplication, and choose the reapply limit (or whatever options work for you).
This is where the behavior will differ a little bit between versions of BigFix:
- If you are using BigFix 6.0.5-6.0.28 or a version greater than 7.0.9.164, then the action will run nightly as expected.
- If you are using a pre-6.0.8 version of BigFix or a 7.0.1-7.0.9.110 (and using “efficient mime”) version of BigFix, the action will only run one time because of a behavior built into these versions that caused reapply actions to only run once unless the relevance becomes unrelevant and then re-relevant. In the example above, the relevance to detect operating system is always going to be “True” on Windows computers and thus the action will only run one time.
If you are confronted with a situation like this, you can append the following relevance to you Task relevance:
AND (not exists last active time of it or (now - last active time of it) > (15 *minute)) of action
So in the example above, your relevance would be:
name of operating system = “Win” AND (not exists last active time of it or (now - last active time of it) > (15 *minute)) of action
This will make the action go unrelevant for 15 minutes after it runs and then become re-relevant (and ready to run again in the future).
To resolve the confusion of what happens when you choose reapply behavior for Fixlet/Tasks that stay true, we are planning on adding an additional option to the “take action dialog” to let you specific the behavior you want in these situations.
Ben