K1000 Appliance v4.3 Upgrade Instructions and Notes

Whenever you upgrade your K1000 appliance to a new version, it is important to ensure that your K1000 client machines are upgraded to the latest version as well, which is a separate, non-automatic step.  With the version you have just requested, that is possibly more important than usual with this release.  Some key 4.3 features (in replication and patching) are supported differently or not at all for clients running versions previous to 4.3.

Here are the steps Kace Support recommends that you follow during this upgrade, for the best possible results.  We've also included key issues to be aware of as well as detailed release notes.  We recommend reading the key issues and upgrade overview before proceeding.

Upgrade Steps

1. Backup your K1000 appliance and save the files offline

Before you upgrade you should copy the backup files that are on your k1000 appliance to a safe location.  You can  these files from the server maintenance tab. 

2. Upgrade Server to 4.3

a. Download the upgrade or wait for your server to automatically do so.

b. Apply the upgrade, which will prompt an appliance reboot when completed.  While the upgrade is taking place, you can download the agent update bundle.

DO NOT REBOOT THE SERVER DURING THE UPGRADE PROCESS.  THIS WILL HAPPEN AUTOMATICALLY.

Note: After the reboot, your server will be upgraded to the new version but your K1000 client machines are not yet up to date. As part of the upgrade, certain features have been automatically disabled on your appliance temporarily, including replication shares and all patch schedules.  You will need to make decisions and take action before re-enabling those features, but make sure you have upgraded all your agents to version 4.3 first, if possible.

2.1. Reapply any SSL Certificates

If applicable you will need to re-apply any SSL key file and certificate file to your K1000 appliance.  Make sure to enable SSH on your K1000 appliance and reboot BEFORE you apply the SSL key. This will provide a safeguard to access your box in case there is a problem with your certificate.

3. Upgrade Clients to 4.3

a. Download the agent patch bundle, if you haven't already.

b. Upload and apply the bundle in the "Agent Updates from KACE" or "K1000 Agent Updates" area in your admin/system interface.

c. Enable agent updates to upgrade your K1000 clients to the latest version by selecting the check-boxes for "Enabled," "Update Broken Agents," and “Deploy to All Machines".  This enables your existing K1000 clients to begin getting the new version as they check in and do inventory.

d. Ensure that you have upgraded all (or most) of your agents to 4.3 before proceeding.  You can check your results by searching for K1000 under Inventory | Software and seeing how many agents have the new and old versions.  The upgrade is a rolling upgrade so the number of 4.3 agents should gradually increase as agents check in to the server and get upgraded.

4. Enable Agent Provisioning for version 4.3 

Note: After applying the upgrade bundle, any agent provisioning schedules you have set will have been disabled.  You will need to take action to re-enable those when you are ready, in order to provision future new agents with the latest version.

5. Configure Patching for enhanced content

Note: Once you have upgraded to the enhanced content feed, you will no longer be able to carry out any patching actions against non-4.3 agents, so it is important that you have carried out the steps in section 2 and 3 above before proceed.

a. Enable Enhanced Content for your environment under "Server Maintenance" on your K1000 appliance

b. If desired, make changes to your existing patch schedules to take advantage of new 4.3 features like patch labels, reprompt intervals and suspending pending tasks.  For details of the decisions and changes in 4.3 patching, you can watch the recording of our Kontinuing Education session at Patching Changes in 4.3

c. Re-enable your existing patch schedules to begin patching with 4.3.

I.  Go to Security | Patching | Detect and Deploy Patches

II. Select the check-box for any patch schedules you wish to enable

III. Select "Choose action..." | Enable Selected Items.

Note: If you have not yet made changes to your patch schedules after the upgrade, your patch schedules will work in essentially the same way as they did previous to the upgrade but you will be receiving the enhanced content feed.

6. Configure replication shares

Note: If you have upgraded to Enhanced Patch Content, your replication infrastructure no longer supports any non-4.3 agents.  It is imperative that you upgrade your agents to 4.3 ASAP if you have not done so, beginning with machines that act as replication agents.  For details of the decisions and changes in 4.3 replication, you can watch the recording of our Kontinuing Education session at Replication Changes in 4.3

a. Review each replication share based on new replication features

I. Confirm that each replication machine has been upgraded to 4.3.  Otherwise, replication for these shares will fail.

II. Select Patch O/S Files, supported Patch Languages and App Patches as appropriate for each replication share, to save bandwidth and disk-space on the replication agent machine.

Note: If you are seeing the "Maintain 4.2 Replication Share" option on the "Replication Share: Edit Detail" page, you have not successfully upgraded to the Enhanced Patching Content option on your K1000 appliance.  If you select the 4.2 replication option here, you will maintain two sets of all replicated files on your replication machine, which is not recommended.

III. Set values for Hi Bandwidth and Lo Bandwidth.  Leaving the value at 0 bytes/sec is specifying unlimited (all available) bandwidth.  That is likely reasonable as the high bandwidth value, but you should set lo bandwidth to be some lower amount to allow you to scale usage as needed.  15000-30000 might be reasonable values, depending on your available network speeds.  In general, the value probably should be no lower than 10000.  If you set the value too low, you can expect replication during the low bandwidth window to take a very long time.

IV. Change replication schedule (if desired).  The color-coded schedule at the bottom of the detail page can be changed by clicking any square to cycle through the available options.

b. Enable/re-enable shares

I. Select the check-box for any replication shares you wish to enable under Distribution | Replication

II. Select "Choose action..." | Enable Selected Shares.

c. Delete the old (pre-4.3) replication files from your replication machines

Note: This step should only be carried out if you will no longer be trying to support agents earlier than 4.3 with the replication agent.  If you have followed the steps up to this point, that should be the case.

I. In the file system of a replication machine, go to the location that has been specified as the Destination Path (for example, D:\k1000files\).

II. In that location, recursively delete the sub-directory named repl1, which contains all of the content previously copied for use by pre-4.3 agents.

7.  Resume your normal K1000 appliance activities (or other work, if there is any).

Key Issues/Recommendations

Notes on "Mixed" Client Environments

The K1000 appliance on version 4.3 can support both 4.3 and previous versions of the K1000 agent, though there are some issues to be aware of if you will have a "mixed" 4.2 (or older)/4.3 client environments.

• Replication agents themselves must be 4.3, even though they can provide files to earlier client versions
• Each replication share that supports a mixed set of clients (the "Maintain 4.2 Replication Share" option) will keep 2 copies of all replicated files (repl1 and repl2), effectively doubling the disk-space needed for replication
•  Once you have enabled "Enhanced Patch Content", patching and replication are only supported for 4.3 or later clients.