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Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
Managing relays
Relays can significantly improve the performance of your installation.
Assigning relays to clients
When you have set up a relay you must direct BigFix clients on your network to gather from that relay, instead of from your server.
Notes about automatic relay assignment
The BigFix clients use a sophisticated algorithm to calculate which relay is the closest on the network.

Installation Guide
Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
- Introduction
  BigFix aims to solve the increasingly complex problem of keeping your critical systems updated, compatible, and free of security issues. It uses patented Fixlet technology to identify vulnerable computers in your enterprise. With just a few mouse-clicks you can remediate them across your entire network from a central console.
- BigFix Platform Unicode Support Overview
  BigFix Platform V10 gathers data from BigFix clients deployed with different code pages and languages, encode the data into UTF-8 format, and report it back to the BigFix server.
- Sample deployment scenarios
  The following deployment scenarios illustrate some basic configurations taken from actual case studies.
- Requirements and assumptions
  BigFix runs efficiently using minimal server, network, and client resources.
- Types of installation
  Before you install the product, decide if you want to do an evaluation or production installation.
- Managing licenses
  You must obtain a license key before you can install and use BigFix.
- Before installing
  Before running the installation make sure that you read the following topics and run the requested activities if needed.
- Installing on Windows systems
  Now that you understand the terms and the administrative roles, you are ready to get authorized and install the programs.
- Installing on Linux systems
  After understanding the terms and the administrative roles, you are ready to actually get authorized and install the programs.
- Installing the clients
  Install the BigFix client on every computer in your network that you want to administer, including the computer that is running the console.
- BigFix Administration Tool
  The BigFix Administration Tool, also called BESAdmin, is the tool we use to perform configuration changes and maintenance operations.
- Post-installation configuration steps
  After having run the installation, make sure that you read the following topics and run the requested activities if needed.
- Managing relays
  Relays can significantly improve the performance of your installation.
  - Relay requirements and recommendations
    Generally, a relay uses minimal resources and does not have a noticeable impact on the performance of the computer running it.
  - Setting up a relay
    To set up a relay, you must designate a Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or Solaris computer that is running a client to act as the relay.
  - Installing and upgrading a relay from the command line
    You can install or upgrade a relay from the command line using the setup.exe installer command.
  - Assigning relays to clients
    When you have set up a relay you must direct BigFix clients on your network to gather from that relay, instead of from your server.
    - Assigning relay at client installation time
      By default, the BigFix clients are configured to connect to the main BigFix server at installation time.
    - Manually assigning relays to existing clients
      You might want to manually specify exactly which clients must connect to which relay.
    - Automatically assigning relays at client installation time
      As you install clients, you might want them to automatically discover the closest relay by default.
    - Automatically assigning relays to existing clients
      You can configure clients to automatically find the closest relay and point to that computer instead of the server.
    - Using relay affiliation
      Relay affiliation provides a more sophisticated control system for automatic relay selection.
    - Notes about automatic relay assignment
      The BigFix clients use a sophisticated algorithm to calculate which relay is the closest on the network.
  - Adjusting the BigFix Server and Relays
    To get the best performance from BigFix, you might need to adjust the server and the relays.
  - Assigning a relay when the server is unreachable
    After you install the client, it connects to and registers with the main BigFix server.
  - Viewing which relay is assigned to a client
    How to see which clients are selecting which relays.
  - Viewing the relay chain on the client
    Starting from Version 9.5 Patch 13, the capability to view the relay chain on a specific BigFix client was added to the product.
- Introduction to Tiny Core Linux - BigFix Virtual Relay
  Follow the step-by-step sequence of operations needed to build the virtual machine, from the downloading of the ISO image to the complete setup and configuration of the BigFix Virtual Relay.
- Setting up a proxy connection
  If your enterprise uses a proxy to access the Internet, your BigFix environment can use that communication path to gather content from sites.
- Running backup and restore
  You can schedule periodic backups (typically nightly) of the BigFix server and database files, to reduce the risk of losing productivity or data when a problem occurs by restoring the latest backup.
- Upgrading on Windows systems
  Before you begin
- Upgrading on Linux systems
  Before you begin
- SQL Server parallelism optimization
  The performance of an SQL Server database instance can often be improved by small tweaks. Performance might also be hindered by simple oversights. In fact, some SQL Server parallelism settings have suboptimal default values. Moreover, they have to be re-tuned after an hardware upgrade. Other issues might arise from inadvertent hardware configurations, especially when SQL Server is hosted on a virtual machine (VM).
- Known limitations and workarounds
  This section describes the known limitations and possible workarounds.
- Logging
  This section describes the log files associated with the BigFix components.
- Uninstalling the BigFix client
  To uninstall the BigFix client installed on the various operating systems, see the following sections.

Notes about automatic relay assignment

The BigFix clients use a sophisticated algorithm to calculate which relay is the closest on the network.

The algorithm uses small ICMP packets with varying TTLs to discover and assign the most optimal relay. If multiple optimal relays are found, the algorithm automatically balances the load. If a relay goes down, the clients perform an auto-failover. This represents a major improvement over manually specifying and optimizing relays. However, there are a few important notes about automatic relay selection:

ICMP must be open between the client and the relay. If the client cannot send ICMP messages to the relays, it is unable to find the optimal relay (in this case it uses the failover relay if specified or picks a random relay).
Sometimes fewer network hops are not a good indication of higher bandwidth. In these cases, relay auto-selection might not work correctly. For example, a datacenter might have a relay on the same high-speed LAN as the clients, but a relay in a remote office with a slow WAN link is fewer hops away. In a case like this, manually assign the clients to the appropriate optimal relays.
Relays use the DNS name that the operating system reports. This name must be resolvable by all clients otherwise they will not find the relay. This DNS name can be overridden with an IP address or different name using a task in the Support site.
Clients can report the distance to their corresponding relays. This information is valuable and should be monitored for changes. Computers that abruptly go from one hop to five, for example, might indicate a problem with their relays.