K1000 Agent re-installation issues caused by GPO created by GPO Provisioning Utility
This
isn’t really a question, but more of I found a problem that support was unable
to assist with due to liability reasons, and I came up with a solution.
After upgrading our K1000 to version 8.0 and the agent bundle to 8.0.152 we were having frequent agent problems, especially when trying to deploy tasks that required reboots (schedule patch deployments). I later discovered the event viewer was filled with MsiInstaller events that indicated that the agent was constantly getting reinstalled, and upon further investing found it to be caused by the GPO created by the latest GPO Provisioning Tool. This meant if I installed patches that required a reboot the machine would reboot and then the verifying/log upload process would get interrupted by the agent re-installation and the K1000 would register a "log upload failed" message.
After upgrading our K1000 to version 8.0 and the agent bundle to 8.0.152 we were having frequent agent problems, especially when trying to deploy tasks that required reboots (schedule patch deployments). I later discovered the event viewer was filled with MsiInstaller events that indicated that the agent was constantly getting reinstalled, and upon further investing found it to be caused by the GPO created by the latest GPO Provisioning Tool. This meant if I installed patches that required a reboot the machine would reboot and then the verifying/log upload process would get interrupted by the agent re-installation and the K1000 would register a "log upload failed" message.
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Posted by:
eethball
6 years ago
Top Answer
After unlinking the GPO all the tasks I was having issues with began to complete without error, and support unfortunately isn’t really able to help with GPO troubleshooting for liability reasons. I still wanted agents to get deployed automatically via Group Policy, so I followed the steps below to create my own GPO and it seems to be working properly.
- Delete the policy created by the GPO Provisioning Tool
- Download your Windows Agent zip from the Settings > Provisioning > Update Agent Settings section of your K1000.
- Extract the MSI from the zip file and put it in a temporary folder
- Download the MSI Settings VBS file (setlang.vbs) from https://support.quest.com/kb/111244 and save it to the same folder as your MSI.
- Open an administrative command prompt and change the directory to the folder with your files in it.
- Run the command “setlang.vbs ampagent-8.0.152-x86_<k1000hostname>.msi 1033” Obviously your agent msi name will be different and if you want a language other than english (1033) you can change the language code.
- Now create a new Group Policy Objects and add the newly modified MSI file to the Computer Configuration > Policies > Software installation and for the deployment method, you can simply select Assigned.
- Now link it to the Computer object OUs that you want the agent deployed to and test it.
Comments:
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This situation sounds like it is possibly related to the fact that the KACE agent directory changed in version 8.0. The GPO tool was updated to version 1.0.122 with 8.0. Prior to 8.0 the GPO tool was version 1.0.117. The resolution appears to be ensuring that the GPO Tool version is 1.0.122 with agents 8.0 and above.
https://support.quest.com/kace-systems-management-appliance/kb/262376/using-an-older-version-of-the-gpo-provisioning-tool-causes-the-kace-agent-to-be-repeatedly-re-installed - pinkmystical 5 years ago
Posted by:
wizzo
6 years ago
Hi @ll,
is that problem resolved in the meanwhile? We have been facing the same problem so I disabled the GPO, I was wondering if this was stick to the buggy agent 8.0.152 or the GPO provisioning tool. Since we updated to agent version 8.1.52 the Agent side bugs are gone, but I´m still afraid to re enable the GPO produced by the provisioning tool. Which is also worrying me is that the provisioning tool is n ot available anymore for download, so I assume its still buggy and I might mess up the environment again by updating/enabling the GPO again. Any experience somebody.
Thx and greets
Posted by:
bwcarty
6 years ago
I'm actively working on a ticket with the exact same symptoms. Patch detect/deploy jobs were having a high number of systems fail with "error (log upload failed)" after the reboot. I then found the msiinstaller log entries showing that the agents have been reinstalling themselves at every group policy refresh interval, and running gpupdate triggers an immediate re-installation.
We're using a GPO created by the deployment tool that only includes the Kace deployment settings, and creating a new GPO from scratch using the tool hasn't helped.
Quest support has been slow to respond...I'm hoping that they've received enough complaints about the GPO deployment tool to get it fixed ASAP.
I'm about to try your suggestion in the meantime.
Posted by:
treigrut
6 years ago
We are having the exact same issue. This is also causing all windows 7 machines to apply the specific GPO for over 2 minutes on start up. ridiculous. I am disabling the policy for now.
Posted by:
kenrinc
6 years ago
Same here as well. When we were using 8.0.152 it was just crazy. Nothing worked and Quest gave no details. We saw the event log entries, knew it was KACE but other than that there was no acknowledgement from Quest that there were issues. Once we moved to 8.1.152 things worked much better! Including the server upgrade. All of sudden patching started working! It had never worked under the previous version. Were still having agent deployment issues and having seen this post I'm intrigued since we are deploying via GPO. I'm considering creating a GPO without the provisioning tool.
Did you try the manual suggestion for creating GPO? success?
TIA - czorn 6 years ago
I can confirm that this manual method has continued to work for our company and the amount of machines reporting the "Log upload failed" message has been reduced to almost nothing. - eethball 6 years ago