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.
This capability is useful when your environment has clients with different code pages and the client reports contain non-ASCII characters. It is supported only if all BigFix components (server, relays, clients) are upgraded to V9.5. To achieve this result, the masthead file has been modified. After it is propagated to the clients and the new values become active, all the client reports containing non-ASCII characters are displayed correctly on the BigFix console, even if the reports come from clients with code page different from the BigFix server code page. The BigFix console works also if installed on a system with local encoding different from the BigFix server encoding by getting the BigFix server encoding and the report encoding from the masthead.
Starting in version 9.5.13, to gather sites that contain non-ASCII fixlets on Linux computers, you must enable the _BESGather_Download_AllowNoStopTranscoding configuration setting. For details, look up the setting in List of settings and detailed descriptions.
To understand how this feature works, read about the concepts of FXF encoding and report encoding.
- FXF encoding
- Affects the top-down data flow, that is, the encoding of the data that flows from the BigFix server to the BigFix clients (such as actions, site subscriptions, computer groups, and more).
- Report encoding
- Affects the bottom-up data flow, that is, the encoding of data that flows from the BigFix clients to the BigFix server.