Question About Upgrading the Flexnet Inventory Agent Using a Third Party Deployment Tool

[mfeinman]

Hi all ...

I have FNMS agents from FNMS 2019 R1 that I'd like to upgrade to FNMS 2022 R1.

The plan is to use a third party deployment tool; probably SCCM (Windows) and JAMF (Mac) but at this point I am not certain.

Is there a specific upgrade package that needs to be downloaded from the Product & License center for this?

If there isn't a specific package, do your deployment scripts basically uninstall the current version and then install the current version using the installation files (i.e. FlexNet Inventory Agent.msi, mgssetup.ini and data1.cab for Windows)?

Or do your scripts stop the existing Flexera agent executables (one technique is here) and then run the installer without removing the prior version first?

I also saw this post and read the chapter in Gathering Flexnet Inventory on this topic but there wasn't much to go on.

Curious about the experiences of those of you who have done this in the past and whether you'd do it that way again if necessary.

--Mark

[mfranz]

From my limited experience with the agent:

1. There's not really am update path, as far as I know, when using 3rd party deployment. So it's just uninstalling the old & installing the new agent.
2. You'll need to uninstall the old agent first. This could be achieved in different ways (e.g. msiexec), maybe check how it was deployed in the first place and then decide from there. Your SCCM & JAMF folks should be able to help you with that.
   Also: https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Knowledge-Base/Uninstalling-ManageSoft-for-managed-devices/ta-p/6001
3. Just use the a current agent package that comes with the FNMS installer for installation. Details on installing, as mentioned by you, should be covered in the Gathering Inventory Guide.

A complete alternative would be using the built-in automatic agent upgrade.

[mfeinman]

The link you provided is perfect, thank you.

Do you know if a list of the deletion product codes exists for recent versions of the agent?  I could see modifying the .vbs file in the provided link to see if certain versions of the agent are installed, and if they exist, to uninstall the existing version first.  (I could log onto computers with different agent versions to get this info, but was hoping that a previously published list was available).

The only lists I see map versions like "2022 R1" to "18.0.x".

--Mark

[Flex-Jeremy]

You can find a list of all the versions of the inventory agent that have been published in the article below: 
https://community.flexera.com/t5/FlexNet-Manager-Knowledge-Base/What-FlexNet-inventory-agent-amp-beacon-release-number/ta-p/2284

You will only see the versions of the agent available to download from the FNMS UI, if you had that version of FNMS installed at some point. I.e. the 9.2 version will not be available unless you had FNMS 9.2 installed in the past. 

[mfranz]

He's looking for the MSI package ID for each agent version. That's, by the way, exactly what @jasonlu was asking in the comments of the article you just linked. That would be really, like seriously, helpful.

[mfeinman]

Precisely.  While I can lookup this info myself by logging into selected machines, it would be much more convenient to simply have this referenced in the same list as this one.

--Mark

[ChrisG]

You actually don't need to uninstall any existing agent install first before installing a new version.

To upgrade an existing agent, simply run the MSI (or RPM on Linux, or whatever package is appropriate for the OS). The installer will stop running processes - this can take 10 minutes or so, so be patient - but you don't need to stop them processes yourself. It will also upgrade the files of an existing installs just fine without you uninstalling the previous version.

NB. When the agent self-upgrade happens, it operates as described above. i.e. It does not uninstall the existing agent version before installing the new agent version.

[mfeinman]

Ahhh, when I tried the direct upgrade approach (no uninstall before running the upgraded MSI), the process seemed to hang, and at that time, I did not know that this was expected behavior.  I thought it was an incompatibility of some sort.  Thank you for pointing this out.