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Summary:

What are the requirements for using the BES Client Deploy Tool?

Solution:

The BES Client Deploy tool comes with the BES Installation Generator.

When it is run, the BES Client Deploy Tool will do the following:

• Contact the domain controller (You can choose whether to use the NT deployment or AD deployment mode)
• Retrieve a list of computers in the domain
• Attempt to contact each computer to see if the BES Client is installed on the computer

You will then be presented with a list of all the computers in your network along with the status of whether the BES Client is installed or not installed or it will report that the computer was not responding if it is off or unreachable. You will then be able to choose computers in the list and deploy the BES Client to the remote computers using your Windows domain administration credentials.

• The computers you are deploying to and the computer running the BES Client from must be part of an NT or AD domain (to deploy to different domains, copy the BES Client Deploy tool folder to a computer on thehttps://ssl.salesforce.com/s.gif different domain)
• You must be logged in with a domain administrator account with all necessary permissions (or any admin account with full permissions on the computers you wish to deploy to)
• You must type in the domain administrator password after you choose to deploy the BES Clients
• The remote computers you wish to deploy to must be Windows, 2000, XP, 2003 Server, Vista, 7, Server 2008, or Server 2008 R2
• The remote computers you wish to deploy to must have the following services running:
  • Workstation
  • Server
  • Net Logon
  • Remote Registry
• The remote computers you wish to deploy to must have 'File and Print sharing' enabled
• The remote computers you wish to deploy to must be reachable using windows RPC protocols. Note:The deploy tool will not work if there is a firewall blocking traffic between you and the remote computer or if the remote computer has a personal firewall blocking traffic. Also note that by default RPC utilizes port 135 as well as a random port above 1024. If you are using a firewall you may want to look into configuring the RPC port to a specific port number so that you can lock it down an allow traffic across that port without opening the firewall completely. (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/154596). RPC can utilize TCP or UDP ports so you should allow for both. The BES Client deploy tool itself does not make use of any other ports beyond what RPC utilizes. Once the BES Client has been installed it will use whichever port you have specified for your license (TCP/UDP 52311 by default)
• You cannot have any network or security policies in place that would prevent our application from connecting to the remote computer and running a service that will use the domain administrator credentials to copy files from a shared location and run them locally on the computer

Certain computers will not accept the RPC connections properly and the BES Client Deploy tool will report an error installing the BES Client. Sometimes these errors will go away if you try to deploy to the computer at a later time (this appears to happen "randomly" on about 2% of computers in most deployments).

If you are unable to use the BES Client Deployment tool for any reason, consider using a different method for BES Client deployment detailed in the BES Administrator's Guide at http://support.bigfix.com/product/.

See also the following articles:
http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=292
http://support.bigfix.com/cgi-bin/kbdirect.pl?id=320