Agent plugin enable/disable by configuration policy

[Sergio Fernandez Marcos]

We have some managed assets that have sdagent and amagent disabled. We don't know how they ended in that state, but we need to reenable them remotely.

Caf doesn't allow enable/disable commands on remote hosts, and psexec is not possible as assets are ENC connected.

 

Is there a configuration policy that can be used to force caf plugins to be enabled or disabled?

[Gordon Lamothe]

Sorry to say this, not sure how experienced you are with ITCM Are you sure they are disabled ?

Both of those plugins run on demand, so you will not see them normally if you do a caf status

 

If you are sure, then :

 

Do you have CA Remote Control ? 

You could login and enable the other plugins

 

You could also create a login script that does the following, if they are already enable it will just re-enable them.

 

caf enable sdagent

caf enable amagent

[Sergio Fernandez Marcos]

Hi Gordon,

 

Remote "caf start sdagent" or "caf start amagent" notifies that plugins are disabled. In those systems where sdagent is disabled but amagent is working, I've created an AM job that executes "caf enable sdagent" thus solving the problem.

 

The problem is that there are some machines that have both plugins disabled, so I cannot send an SD job to enable amgent, nor send an AM job to enable sdagent.

 

Managed assets are customer´s machines, so we cannot connect to them by our initiave. We have to wait until the final user opens a ticket, and, in the meanwhile, nothing can be done.

 

So we need something that changes the plugin state remotely and transparently to the final user (we don't have control over login scripts either). Configuration policy, if supported, seems a good way to do it.

 

Regards.

[Richard Little]

Sorry Sergio

 

I am afraid there is no way to do this via configuration policy. What version are you running. you could possible use the health monitoring agent

regards

Rich

[Sergio Fernandez Marcos]

Sadly we are in 12.8FP1, so no health monitoring on the agent.

[Richard Little]

really sorry but I cannot think of anything else that could help

[mccst05]

I think I have an idea which should work – we can ‘hijack’ one of the CAF Scheduler tasks in config policy to fix it. Take the ‘Run Mirrorsync’ scheduler task which is not used in windows usually, and change it to allow it to enable the SDAgent and AMAgent Plug-ins. Change the policy as follows:

 

 

·         Command Line:                enable amagent sdagent

 

·         Enabled:                              TRUE

 

·         Plugin dependency:        cfregister

 

Deliver this policy only to those machines which need it, and remove it when they are fixed. It’s not really critical since it won’t hurt anything if the enable command gets run multiple times but it’s not necessary.

 

Steve McCormick, ITIL

CA Technologies

Principal Services Consultant

Tel: [phone]

[e-mail]

<mailto:[e-mail]>

[Sergio Fernandez Marcos]

Hi Steve,

 

I've been trying your suggestion and it looks very promising. I'm still doing some tests, but it seems to have solved the problem in some of the "lost" agents. There are others that still don't run the jobs, but probably they have different problems with same symptom.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

Regards.

[Anon Anon]

HI

I was wondering if you issue or questions have been resolved with the advice given ?

Thanks and let us know

Joe

[Richard Little]

Hi

 

Do you require any further assistance on this

 

Regards

Rich