vIf the agent to run the background scan is available, the scan job appears in the
Command Jobs window at midnight on the day of a new refresh cycle.
vIf the agent to run the background scan is not available, the scan job appears in
the Command Jobs window when the agent is available, provided it is on a
valid start date.
Q: How many states does a background job go through?
A: A background job starts out in the Pending state. It quickly goes to one of these
states:
vThe job moves to the Idle state if a scan window is not open.
vThe job moves to the Processing state when a scan window is open, if an agent
is available, and if it is the highest priority job.
Q: Why does a scanning job expire?
A: If a scan job has not finished when a new refresh cycle begins, the job goes into
the Expired state shortly after midnight on the day of the new refresh cycle.
Q: Why did my background scan continue to run even when the refresh cycle
started again?
A: If you rerun a background scan, it is not confined by refresh cycles. It runs like
an ad hoc scan in that respect.
Q: Why did my background scanning job stop when I ran an ad hoc scan on the
same group?
A: According to the rules for prioritization, an ad hoc scan has priority of a
background scan. If you run an ad hoc scan on a group where background scan is
running, the background scan pauses after it completes its current subtask and
then gives priority to the ad hoc scan. The background scan will resume after the
ad hoc scan has finished.
Q: When I run background scans for discovery and assessment, why does the
assessment scan run as a single job sometimes but as separate jobs for each group
at other times?
A: The answer depends on how you set up your policies. Assume the following
conditions:
vYou have defined a Scan Control policy for a parent group,and that policy is
inherited by the subgroups.
vYou have defined separate Discovery policies for each subgroup.
In that case, you can expect the following:
If you set up the Scan Control policy so
that the assessment scan... Then, the assessment scan...
Waits for the discovery scan to finish before
the assessment scan begins
Starts as a separate job for each subgroup as
soon as the discovery scan finishes. This
allows assessment scanning to begin for a
subgroup whose discovery scan has finished
without having to wait for the discovery
scans of all groups to finish.
Chapter7. Managing scans in SiteProtector 101