setting

Settings are named values that can be applied to individual Fixlet sites or to client computers. Each setting has a time associated with it. This time stamp is used to establish priority -- the latest setting will trump any earlier ones.

Settings can be created and propagated by IBM BigFix Console Operators. Settings issued by the Console will be tagged with the current time and date. Settings are separated into groups, including one for each site and one for the client. Each group of settings is independent of the others and is persistent on the client.

Settings can also be created by actions in Fixlets, and typically use the substitution {now}, which is evaluated when the action is executed. You can examine these settings and their time stamps with Inspectors such as "effective date of <setting>" (see the Inspector Guides for more information).

Syntax

setting "<name>"="value" on "<date>" for client

setting "<name>"="value" on "<date>" for site "<sitename>"

Where name=value describes the setting, and date is a time-stamp used to establish priority. These can be set for the client computers or for a named site.

Examples

setting "name"="Bob" on "31 Jan 2007 21:09:36 gmt" for client

Sets the name variable to Bob on the client machine with a MIME date/time stamp provided by the Console when this setting was created. It will supersede any other name setting with an earlier date.

setting "preference"="red" on "{now}" for site "color_site"

Upon execution of the action containing this command, {now} is evaluated as a MIME date/time and substituted into the string. This command sets the "preference" variable to "red" for the specified Fixlet site. Note that unless there are multiple sites with the same name, you can specify the site without the full gather URL. You may have a different "preference" setting on each site.

setting "time"="{now}" on "{now}" for current site

Immediately sets the time variable to the current time on the current site.

setting "division"="%22design group%22" on "15 Mar 2007 17:05:46 gmt" for client

This example uses %xx to indicate special characters by their hexadecimal equivalent. In this case, %22 encloses the value of the variable in double quotes.

Note

When a client is reset, the effective dates of the settings are removed and any subsequent setting commands will overwrite them. There are several ways that clients can be reset, including computer-ID collisions (most often caused by accidentally including the computer ID in an image that gets copied to multiple systems), changing an action site masthead to a new server, or instructing the client to collect a new ID.

The actions that run next will establish a new effective date, but the setting values will be the same as before the reset. The values are retained because they contain information such as relay selections. That way, when a deployment reset occurs, you don’t have to issue new actions to reset your network relay structure.

Version 5.1 and above