Way to target only new clients?

Content Authoring
1

Is there a way to target only newly added BigFix clients? Say, anything added in the last hour or day or whatever? I had previously been targeting only computers in the default Computers OU in AD to ensure that all of our approved patches automatically get installed on new servers, but one of my teammates has setup our server build automation to put new servers into a specific OU, so that’s not going to continue to work for me.

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Sure, several ways off the top of my head…

  1. When installing a new client, you could set up a clientsettings.cfg to precreate a setting like “NewComputer=true” and target off that setting. A task in your “catch up new computers” would change the setting to “false” or delete the setting.

  2. You could do the inverse - take an action now on your computers to set “NewComputer=false”, and in the future target only systems that are missing this setting. Could be problematic though if you have some systems that stay offline for a while and don’t get this action applied, they’d show up as a new computer next time.

  3. If you’re Windows-only, you can look up the property that’s generating “OS Installation Date” and duplicate that. You have to decide if you mean “New Computers” or “New to BigFix” though, in case you’ve had a machine that was installed long ago and then gets introduced to BigFix later.

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3

This relevance will give you the approximate time that the BigFix client was installed and working:

minimum of subscribe times of sites

This will give you how long ago that was:

Q: now - minimum of subscribe times of sites
A: 349 days, 01:39:29

This will give you a TRUE result if the install time was less than 1 day ago:

(now - minimum of subscribe times of sites) < 1*day

This will give you a TRUE result if the install time was less than 3 hours ago:

(now - minimum of subscribe times of sites) < 3*hour
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4

Thanks guys! These all sound like good ideas, especially using “minimum of subscribe times of sites.” I’ll try those out.

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5

this is an great way, but is there any way to trigger and target baselines to this relevance ?

6

When you create a baseline, Under the RELEVANCE tab choose the third option.

Then simply include the relevance you want to evaluate with (for example) …

(now - minimum of subscribe times of sites) < 3*hour

Computers that do not Evaluate the Relevance as TRUE will not process the rest of the baseline components.

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But how this will relate to it, if someone has reinstalled the BESClient on that machine, in such scenario machines which were running from long ago but somehow BESClient re-installed into them then these baseline with such relevance keep on targeting them.

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So, something has caused the client to be removed, and you reinstall it, but don’t want any of the previous Baselines to run?

Assuming you are talking about Windows computers, you can use something like …

current date - (((((last 2 of it)) & " " &(first 3 of (first 2 of (last 4 of it) as integer as month as string)) & " " & (first 4 of it as integer as string)) of (first 8 of string value of (selects "InstallDate from Win32_OperatingSystem" of wmi))) as date)

This will tell you how many days old the Operating System is.

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If you have a set of baselines that should be “once and done”, meaning they will only ever run on a system a single time, then those baselines can set a file on the system at the very end, and have relevance that checks to see that the file does not exist.

This allows you to have a baseline trigger on new clients, but only once even if the client is reinstalled.

One of the problems with @TimRice 's suggestion of using the OS Install date is that if you want to ensure these baselines run at least once, it will be missed if the BES Client is installed on a system that has been around for longer than the threshold you set.

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what if it is a Linux/unix box. how to check OS installation date for those.