Where have all my Linux packages gone?

If you have recently installed Cumulative Update 7 for System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 (CU7) on your management servers and then attempted to push install a Linux\Unix agent then you may have encountered this issue.

The agent installation packages are no longer there!

When we install our Cumulative Update packages we retain a “dummy” file for the 1.0.4-248 builds of the Linux\Unix agents and keep only the very latest version of the real agent package files, deleting all others. What can happen is that when installing CU7 we hit a snag with the versioning and end up in a state where we have removed the previous agent packages but have not put in place the new ones.

How do I know if I am impacted by this?

Take a look in your %ProgramFiles\System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2\AgentManagement\UnixAgents directory it should have all of the following files in it:

If you have been impacted by this issue then you will only have the “dummy” 31 byte files listed, together with the SCXAgent dlls and possibly these which you will have if you were installing CU7 onto CU5 or earlier:

• scx-1.0.4-318.aix.7.ppc.lpp.gz
• scx-1.0.4-318.solaris.11.sparc.pkg.Z
• scx-1.0.4-318.solaris.11.x86.pkg.Z

How Can I Recover?

The good news is that the remedy is very straightforward and quick to apply. The file version problem is caused by the SCXAgent dll files, so what we need to do is as follows:

1. Rename the SCXAgent dll files in the %ProgramFiles\System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2\AgentManagement\UnixAgents directory to something else (e.g. SC).

2. Now rerun the Cross-Plat installation patch on the server to put the new files in place. On my system it is located at %ProgramFiles(x86)%\System Center 2007 R2 Hotfix Utility\KB2783850\KB2783850-SCX.msp.

3. To finish, remove the old renamed SCXAgent files.

OK I haven’t hit this yet, but I am about to install CU7…

If you’re about to install CU7, you can run step 1 on the management servers before you do your install to avoid hitting this. You installation procedure in that case would look something like this:

1. Rename the SCXAgent dll files in the %ProgramFiles\System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2\AgentManagement\UnixAgents directory.

2. Install CU7.

3. Remove the old SCXAgent files.

Brian McDermott| Escalation Engineer | Microsoft CTS Management and Security Division

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