Bottom-up data flow: from BigFix clients to BigFix server

BigFix Platform V9.5 uses UTF-8 as the standard encoding system to send reports from BigFix clients to BigFix server. The x-bes-report-charset parameter is set to utf-8 in the masthead and its value cannot be changed.

In this way, any text character is efficiently represented and handled, regardless of the language, application, or platform that you are working on.

After upgrading a BigFix server V9.2 to V9.5, the updated masthead with the new x-bes-fxf-charset and x-bes-report-charset parameters is propagated through the whole deployment.

BigFix clients V9.2 manage the x-bes-report-charset parameter and send their reports as UTF-8 encoded to the BigFix V9.5 server, but they are able to recognize and convert to UTF-8 only the characters related to the local code page.

BigFix clients V9.1 ignore the x-bes-report-charset parameter and continue to send their reports with an encoding that depends on their configuration (such as either local operating system encoding, or an encoding forced by the _BESClient_DeploymentEncoding_IANAName client setting).

If the value of the x-bes-fxf-charset in the updated masthead is different from the value of the FXF encoding that the client was using before the upgrade, then the BESClient process must be restarted for the new value to become effective. In this case, the behavior of the client depends on its version, according to the following:
  • BigFix clients V9.2.6 or later restart the BESClient process automatically and make the new masthead parameters effective immediately.
  • BigFix clients V9.2.0 through V9.2.5 will have the new masthead parameters effective at the time the BESClient process is restarted for the first time after receiving the updated masthead.
  • BigFix clients V9.1 are not influenced by the new masthead parameters.
Important: Immediately after receiving the updated masthead, restart the BESClient process on BigFix clients V9.2.0 through V9.2.5 to activate the new masthead parameters. Use the tasks available under BES Support to restart the clients. You can find these tasks by filtering for "Troubleshooting: Restart BES client" the Fixlets and Tasks list on the BigFix Console.
Note: After upgrading BigFix to V9.5, the filldb process on clients might fail if the filldb buffer directory contains reports that use an unexpected report encoding value, for example ReportEncoding: hp-roman8. If so, clean up the filldb buffer directory containing the reports and then restart filldb.