Check ZENworks Agent
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Thursday, 24 November 2005 15:17
I wrote a little utility which helps you in upgrading your ZENworks agent outside NAL.
Because the ZENworks agent can’t be upgraded by launching an application from within the NAL (because nalwin32.exe is part of the program files set of the ZENworks agent setup), we have to script the unattended installation outside ZENworks by launching a batch file from the login script.

”chkzenag.exe” is a freeware utility which can be helpful in this case. When launched, it checks the version number in the registry of the installed ZENworks agent against what is provided as the first parameter on the command line. If both versions are not identical, an external program or batch file is launched, this is the second parameter of “chkzenag.exe”. This batch file, in this example called “chkver.bat”, can then contain a command line similar to:

”msiexec /i ZfDAgent.msi TRANSFORMS=ZfDAgent.mst /qb REBOOTPROMPT =Suppress”

So, if we want to upgrade any older version than version “6.5.200.50909” (which is the current official version of the ZENworks 6.5 agent), the batch file can look like this:
…
@echo off
z:\zenworks\zfdagent\english\chkzenag.exe 6.5.200.50909 z:\zenworks\zfdagent\english\zfdagent.bat
…

where “zfdagent.bat” contains:
…
”msiexec /i z:\zenworks\zfdagent\english\ZfDAgent.msi TRANSFORMS=ZfDAgent.mst /qb REBOOTPROMPT=Suppress”
…

A good practice is to put all these files in sys\PUBLIC\zenworks\ZfDAgent\English because there’s already a ZfDAgent.msi there by default and it’s updated automatically when you install a ZENworks Service Pack. So this directory must contain:

chkver.bat            which can be launched from the login script
chkzenag.exe      which will be launched from chkver.bat
zfdagent.bat         which will be launched by chkzenag.exe
ZfDAgent.MSI      the latest version of the ZENworks agent
ZfDAgent.MST    the transform file for ZfDAgent.MSI


Some other public properties of ZfdAgent.msi which we can use in our script are:

EDITABLE_MT_ADDRESS=1

  • Allow the user to change the ZENworks Middle Tier IP address where authentication will take place. This is available only if the Novell Client is not installed.

HTTP_PORT            

  • port name for the middle tier

MT_SERVER_ADDRESS       

  • IP address or DNS name of the ZENworks middle tier server

NAL_SINGLE_TREE       

  •  whether the agent can connect to only one specific tree (ZENWORKS_TREE)

STARTUP_APPEXPLORER   

  • Launch Application Explorer on Windows startup, set to 0 if you do not want the application window to be launched.

STARTUP_APPWINDOW   

  • Launch Application Window on Windows startup, set to 0 if you do not want the application window to be launched.

ZENWORKS_TREE        

  • NDS tree to which Zfd connects to


Features which can be used with the ADDLOCAL public property:

  1. ApplicationLauncher - WorkstationManager
  2. Inventory
  3. RemoteManagement
  4. Imaging
Note: runas.exe and sanur.exe programs are required if the local user does not have administrator rights to the workstation. Runas doesn't seem to have a method for accepting a password from anything other than the keyboard ...sanur.exe allows you to pass the password from within the logon script to the runas command (also see TID10085696).

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 18 April 2006 15:39