Updating BigFix Fixlet sites in preparation for 8.0

Usage and Config Platform
1

(imported topic written by BenKus)

Hey folks,

We have recently started to update our Fixlet sites in preparation for BigFix 8.0 (which we expect to be released in a few months). The changes include some enhanced user interface, new features, and improved performance that will be utilized by the new version of BigFix.

Yesterday morning (3/31) we published a change that created a bigger-than-expected site gather for our main English patch site (around 1.5MB), which means that the agents would download this package the next time they gathered the patches site.

We expect that most customers would not have noticed this change because the normal relay placement and configurations (such as bandwidth throttling) are designed to make updates like this very easy for networks to handle… but this situation would potentially be noticeable for network environments that had limited and shared bandwidth (such as retail stores with satellite connections).

We have already addressed the issue in the Fixlet site to permantently remove the big files from being downloaded by the agents, which should completely eliminate any issue, but we wanted to note this incident in case people noted extra network traffic yesterday.

We have also taken extra precautions in our Fixlet publishing process to ensure we keep our Fixlet site updates very small.

Thanks and let me know if you have any questions,

Ben

2

(imported comment written by SystemAdmin)

We definitely did notice. There was impact to our many remote locations over small WAN links.

Please communicate to customers concerning size and timing if larger than normal updates are planned. A slow steady small stream of updates is much preferred. Thanks.

3

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Thanks, Jon… Sorry about the issue and we will certainly do our best to inform customers if we need to make a big change… although we do not expect this situation to occur again as we believe we have put in place the appropriate protections on our side to guard against this.

Ben