Does anyone have any information or insight into why multiple Big Fix workstations clients stop reporting to the Big Fix console and only rebooting the machine gets it to start reporting again? We have around 14,0000 Big Fix workstation endpoints. Every week i find 10 to 15 workstations where the client is running, but the log has stopped and the device is no longer reporting. This usually occurs on workstations that have an up time of 10 or more days. When i attempt to start and stop the BES service it hangs, and i have to kill the Besclient.exe process. After killing the process, i can restart the service and the box reports 1 time and then never again until reboot. After the reboot, the machine reports fine.
Anyone else seeing this and have a āfixā that does not include manually rebooting the workstation?
I canāt say Iāve seen that before. Iād suspect that there may be a long-running action or property thst is leaving something locked on the machine, but itās just a guess.
When the client hangs, was there a running Action? It might be shown in recent log entries, or it could be an action started much earlier, so Iād check the status in the Console for action history on the computer before restarting the client.
You may need to enable client debug logging to see whether you can identify a particular property that is getting evaluated and taking a long time to run. The procmon utility from microsoft.com/sysinternals may be helpful as well, if you can see the besclient.exe process still trying to do anything while itās in this hung state.
If you donāt have a support ticket open yet, you should probably create one so the support team can guide you on troubleshooting it.
There are no jobs running or actions. The Besclient.exe 's only child process is the besclientui. There isnāt an error in the logs and the last logged event is different for each machine. This also only seems to be an issue on Windows 10 1809 boxes. We were not seeing this issue when we were on 1607. We do not have this issue on Windows 7 . It is also does not appear to be happening on any 2008 R2 servers or 2016 1607 servers and they usually run 30 days before restarts.
The last logged event in the Big Fix log is different for each machine. Also, i can restart the agent \ client service by killing the Besclient process, and then the machine reports to the console , starts to check Fixlets \ pull jobs, but eventually the client locks up again and stops reporting \ processing data.
Since these clients seem to continue to have problems after restarting the service, you are in a unique position in that you can collect extra logging data after the problem has started. Once a client is āhungā, Iād recommend you stop the service, then enable debugging logging and the client usage profiler as described at https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21505873 and then start the client again.
You should certainly open a PMR so support can help you collect and evaluate these logs, but if you want to continue on your own or here in the forum that data should be useful.
Sounds similar to an issue I have experienced. Check your previously executed jobs to ensure none of them are creating a locked file within the BESClient folder structure under program files