Custom Fixlet Authoring

In addition to pre-authored, pre-tested BES Solutions for Patch Management, Vulnerability Management, and Endpoint Security available with BES, administrators can use the authoring environment integrated within the BES Console to create powerful custom Fixlets, Tasks, and Analyses to enforce policies, view computer information, detect and remediate vulnerabilities and many other configuration management issues.

For instance, with custom Fixlet content, you can do the following:


  • Remove the new P2P software that is hogging all your company's bandwidth.
  • Find those rogue DHCP servers that have been causing you so much network trouble.
  • Update the custom applications in your company.
  • And much more...

Here is some documentation that will allow you learn how to use the Relevance and Action Language to create custom content.


Other Tools

  • New! Fixlet Debugger - Fixlet Debugger (4.2 MB) - Alpha version (updated 12/20/2007)
  • Relevance Debugger (QnA)
    • Download - Relevance Debugger (2.0 MB) - version 7.0.9.164
    • Description - The Relevance Debugger application (QnA) allows a user to do local relevance evaluation to help develop Fixlet messages and retrieved properties. The Relevance Debugger can be run on Window's OSes only.
    • Instructions to use the Relevance Debugger -
      1. Download the zip file above and extract to a folder.
      2. Run the RelevanceDebugger.exe file. A notepad-like interface will appear with a top and bottom window.
      3. Type any relevance expression, then select the "Edit" menu followed by the "Evaluate option" or press Ctrl+Enter. For instance, type name of operating system and hit Ctrl+Enter. You should see the answer returned as something like Win2000.
      4. See the "Training Guide for Writing Fixlet Messages" above for more information on creating relevance statements.
    Note: Non-Windows BES Clients already contain an appropriate version of QnA for the operating system they run on. The program file is contained as part of the BES Client package distribution.
    Note: QnA will behave differently on Vista BES Clients unless it is run with elevated privileges. If it is run in the standard user space it may return answers different than the actual BES Client. The following inspectors in particular are affected by this: regapp, recent applications, services (and any inspectors that reference process information).
    Note: For previous versions of the QnA utility, please refer to the following page: http://support.bigfix.com/fixlet/qna_archives.html
  • sha1.exe
    • Download - sha1.exe (50 KB)
    • Description - When creating a Fixlet message action or custom action that downloads a file from the Internet or an untrusted source, it is always a good idea to verify that a checksum of the file matches a known value before running the file to ensure that you downloaded the correct unchanged file. The sha1.exe application will generate an action command that will verify the size and SHA1 checksum of a file. This action command can be pasted into the action of a Fixlet message so that the BES Client can verify the checksum before the BES Client executes the file. (Note: the sha1 value in the action will also allow the BES Server and BES Relay to maintain a persistent cache of the downloaded files.)
    • Example of a download action without using the checksum:

      download http://testserver.com/download/package.exe
      run __download/package.exe /s

    • Example of a download action using an SHA1 checksum:

      download http://testserver.com/download/package.exe

      continue if {(size of it = 2643496 and sha1 of it = "1ae3b0718cfaae3d5fb74be78535b844c6c76823") of file "package.exe" of folder "__download"}

      run __download/package.exe /s

    • The "continue if ..." statement in the action above can be generated using the sha1.exe file. Simply run the sha1.exe file with the argument "-r <filename>" from the command line. For example:

      C:\>sha1.exe -r package.exe
      continue if {(size of it = 2643496 and sha1 of it = "1ae3b0718cfaae3d5fb74be78535b844c6c76823") of file "package.exe" of folder "__download"}

      You would then copy this result into a custom action or Fixlet action.


Contact authorsupport@bigfix.com with problems related to custom authoring. Note: Custom authoring support is not included in the standard BES support contract. You will need to purchase an Custom Authoring support contract if you would like help creating custom content (contact professional_services@bigfix.com for more information).

Classes are also available for detailed custom authoring training. Contact professional_services@bigfix.com for more information.