Learn the system requirements, licensing and installation instructions, and how to configure and maintain BigFix.
After understanding the terms and the administrative roles, you are ready to actually get authorized and install the programs.
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 V11 gathers data from BigFix clients deployed with different code pages and languages. It encodes all data into UTF-8 format, and reports it back to the BigFix server.
The following deployment scenarios illustrate some basic configurations taken from actual case studies.
BigFix runs efficiently using minimal server, network, and client resources.
Before you install the product, decide if you want to do an evaluation or production installation.
You must obtain a license key before you can install and use BigFix.
Before running the installation make sure that you read the following topics and run the requested activities if needed.
Now that you understand the terms and the administrative roles, you are ready to get authorized and install the programs.
BigFix 11 Server installation on Linux has IBM DB2 as a prerequisite. It must be installed before the BigFix Server is installed.
Starting from BigFix Version 11 Patch 1, the Linux Server installation introduces the support of Red Hat 9 x86 64-bit with Microsoft SQL Server database.
Download BigFix from HCL License & Delivery Portal (Flexnet).
To install a BigFix server with an evaluation license on Linux with DB2, perform the following steps:
To install a BigFix server with an evaluation license on Linux with MS SQL, perform the following steps:
You can run the Production or Evaluation installation in interactive or silent mode. You can use a single installer for different components.
After the BigFix installation, you can see the following folder structure.
At the end of the installation you can find the following BigFix files containing the settings of the installed components and the installation messages.
Procedure to manage the services.
How to change the database password.
You can have one or more BigFix components installed on a local system and you can decide to remove one or all of them at the same time.
For each additional server that you want to add to your deployment, ensure that they are communicating with each other, and then perform the following steps.
Multiple servers can provide a higher level of service for your BigFix installation.
To uninstall a replication server, call the database-stored procedure delete_replication_server, which removes the specified ID from the replication set.
delete_replication_server
Install the BigFix client on every computer in your network that you want to administer, including the computer that is running the console.
The BigFix Administration Tool, also called BESAdmin, is the tool we use to perform configuration changes and maintenance operations.
After having run the installation, make sure that you read the following topics and run the requested activities if needed.
Relays can significantly improve the performance of your installation.
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.
If your enterprise uses a proxy to access the Internet, your BigFix environment can use that communication path to gather content from sites.
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.
Before you begin
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).
This section describes the known limitations and possible workarounds.
This section describes the log files associated with the BigFix components.
To uninstall the BigFix client installed on the various operating systems, see the following sections.