Inventory Agent Automatic Deployment Cautions

FlexNet Manager Suite 2024 R2 (On-Premises)

Automatic upgrades (or downgrades) of policy-controlled installations of FlexNet Inventory Agent are available for each supported operating system platform (see the FlexNet Manager Suite System Requirements and Compatibility documentation for each release for the current version of FlexNet Manager Suite for a list of the supported operating system platforms). However, the following guidelines apply:

• Avoid using automatic deployment by FlexNet Manager Suite when you are using third party tools to deploy FlexNet Inventory Agent, as conflicting specifications of the version to deploy can cause damage to the existing installation and upgrade failures.
• If FlexNet Inventory Agent is installed on AIX or Linux platforms in a custom path, automatic upgrade by FlexNet Manager Suite is supported only for upgrades to FlexNet Inventory Agent version 13.2.0 or later (and depends on the config.ini file being available in its standard location, /var/opt/managesoft/etc). If you have specified an earlier target release of FlexNet Inventory Agent for AIX or Linux platforms where your installation uses a custom location, disable automatic upgrades for the affected platform(s).
• FlexNet Inventory Agents on Debian or Ubuntu Linux do not support automatic upgrades or downgrades.
• When ndlaunch downloads a new package from the beacon for a self-upgrade, it triggers a relaunch, which stops the existing services and initiates the installation of the new package with an upgrade option. If the new package detects that the operating system version is too outdated, it will not uninstall the old package and will skip the installation of the new one. For example, if CentOS 5.1 has the 16.1 agent installed and then requests a policy from a 23.1 beacon with auto-upgrade enabled, the relaunch will not proceed, as the operating system is not supported. In this case, no upgrade will occur. However, if you manually copy a 16.1 relaunch module, the installation will be skipped due to a mismatch in the RPM signature of the new package. Instead, the services will be restarted.
• The FlexNet Inventory Agent should function properly if an upgrade is possible. If an upgrade cannot be performed, it will fail to upgrade and leave the existing installation intact and running. New packages must be compatible with the target operating system before attempting to uninstall the old version and install the new binaries. The upgrade may be attempted each time the policy is downloaded, which is standard behavior.

Tip: This inventory setting grants permission (through policy) to the FlexNet Inventory Agents to perform self-upgrades or downgrades to the specified version. The setting, therefore, can only be put into effect on those platforms where the FlexNet Inventory Agent includes self-update functionality. The agents that have been installed for the least privilege operation mode on UNIX-like platforms are not able to perform self-updates. In these cases, you can do any of:

• Deploy new versions of FlexNet Inventory Agent manually
• Use your preferred third-party deployment tool to publish updates to FlexNet Inventory Agents
• Uninstall the old version(s) of FlexNet Inventory Agent, and once again target the devices for adoption through FlexNet Manager Suite.