Ain’t this just the way things go?
Couple weeks ago, the remote management agent software installed on one particular server at a client site failed its self-update after a remote management system server upgrade the week before. This happens from time to time, it usually just means we have to uninstall and reinstall the software.
Only, this time around the vendor introduced a bug with the installation process necessitating a bunch of fiddly manual fixing of various things. Annoying, but not unheard-of from these clowns. We had to do this with a few other cases in the days immediately preceding this one particular case.
However. The fix that Support came up with for the bug their people introduced absolutely failed for this one server. We would run the removal-and-cleanup utility, then we would run the agent installer. The installer would do its thing, then pop up a dialog box reading, “Installation was successful.” This was a bald-faced lie, as there wasn’t so much as a program folder, let alone files within said folder, created by the installer.
Two entire weeks I spent going back-and-forth with Support. “Have you tried…?” Yes. “Are you sure you…?” Yes. “Can you send us screenshots/logs?” Done. Please give me a working solution, this has been going on far too long now.
After closing time on Friday (gee, thanks!) they sent a scheduling request so we could join a remote session today. The goal being that they could watch while I went through the process, the same process I’d performed a dozen times by now, and make notes and take screenshots and try to figure out what was going wrong. Luckily I checked my work email over the weekend and was able to get a good timeslot for this remote session request.
Today, half an hour early (!!), the assigned Support technician called and we got into the remote session on my problem server. While the tech watched, I downloaded and ran the installer from the same link as always, it popped up the “successful” dialog, and…
… there it was. Running properly. It even found its original agent ID in the management system and reattached to it, which is unheard-of for this agent software. (Usually once we’ve been forced to run the cleanup utility, we’re stuck migrating all the settings to a new copy in the system.)
All because, as the adage goes, “Any broken product, when demonstrated for the repairman, will work perfectly.” Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I decided to chalk it up as a holiday-season miracle, put down my tools, and back away slowly.
Ticket closed, moving on to the next crisis.
