I have a bunch of software that I need to import into BF. I have used the wizard a few times and it does work fine, but is slow and tedious, so I was thinking that I seem to be doing the same thing pretty much all the time, so could I export a BES file, modify for a new piece of software and import. Some of the “challenges” are:
file storage. When the wizard imports, it creates the sha1 hash and that is the directory name along with the “continue if” statement. I guess I could manually do this, but is there really any purpose other than confirming the correct file?
Multiple files. In the wizard, it will automatically take multiple files and folders and compress them to the .tmp file. I am not sure if there is a command line way of doing this or not. What I was considering was using zip to compress to a zip file and creating a directory for the application and put the zip file in. I also created a directory called utilities in C:\Program Files\BigFix Enterprise\BES Server\wwwrootbes\Uploads\ and put unzip.exe in there. So when a zip file is deployed the action looks something like:
I know it is missing a bunch of checks but trying to get the idea down
Now given the above 2, I am assuming that this will still all work with the relays, correct? Is anyone else doing something like this or am I asking for a world of hurt?
This is an area we’re doing some interesting work in, we definitely see the need for a library and some enhanced file management. Stay tuned for more detailed announcements as we get closer to release.
There’s a more efficient way to do that now, the prefetch command. Scroll down to the SHA1.exe section on this page: http://support.bigfix.com/fixlet/ for example usage. While checking size and sha1 isn’t strictly necessary, it does save some headaches when working with spotty network and is often a high level security requirement.
Jack, will the Software Distro Wizard be updated to use the prefetch command? I’ve been wondering about this for some time now and was curious why it was not done with version 8? Version 8 has the Windows Shell Integration right click SHA1 feature, which is really cool, and we use that to change the software distro wizard fixlets.
one big reason is that we don’t force you to upgrade clients, so we’d also need to put in relevance to detect the client version (which seems to defeat the purpose). It’s a good idea to do that eventually since the older clients that don’t understand prefetch will fall out of support, but it’s been lower priority than preparing this new tool.
I will second that request. I am not under NDA, but we are an IBM business partner and will be doing quite a bit of work with BigFix.
There are multiple uses I can see for that I am trying to do (mass import being one of them), so this is why I am asking this. I have also developed a process to incorporate Tivoli Software Package Blocks into Bigfix. I am aware that IBM plans to have this sometime next year, but I have customers that I know can use this functionality. Since the SPBs are self-contained and not easily modified, the requirement for the sha1 may not be as much of an issue.
From what I read in the sha1, you are required to use the sha1 to have relays cache it, is this correct?
"the sha1 value in the action will also allow the BES Server and BES Relay to maintain a persistent cache of the downloaded files. "
I have not set up the relay yet in my lab, so maybe I should just get this done and test it
