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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.
Using relay affiliation
Relay affiliation provides a more sophisticated control system for automatic relay selection.
Choosing relay affiliation group names
There are no predefined relay affiliation group names; you can choose any group names that are logical to your deployment of BigFix.

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 V9.5 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. Your organization might look similar to one of the examples below, depending on the size of your network, the various bandwidth restrictions between clusters and the number of relays and servers. The main constraint is not CPU power, but bandwidth.
- 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.
      - Choosing relay affiliation group names
        There are no predefined relay affiliation group names; you can choose any group names that are logical to your deployment of BigFix.
      - Assigning clients to relay affiliation groups
        Clients are assigned to one or more relay affiliation groups through the client setting:
      - Associating relays and server to affiliation groups
        Relays and servers can be assigned to one or more affiliation groups through the client setting:
    - 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.
  - 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
    To see which clients are selecting which relays run the following steps:
  - Viewing the relay chain on the client
    Starting from 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
- Upgrading on Linux systems
- 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

Choosing relay affiliation group names

There are no predefined relay affiliation group names; you can choose any group names that are logical to your deployment of BigFix.

Observe the following naming rules:

Do not use special characters (including ".") when choosing names
Group names are not case-sensitive
Leading and trailing white spaces are ignored in comparisons

The ordering of relay affiliation groups is important for the client. The asterisk (*) has a special meaning in a relay affiliation list; it represents the set of unaffiliated computers. Unaffiliated computers are clients or relays that do not have any relay affiliation group assignments or have the asterisk group listing.

Note: The labels, defined in the client setting _BESRelay_Register_Affiliation_AdvertisementList and delimited by semi-colon ( ; ), must not be bigger than 64 characters.

For more information, see Relay affiliation.