Solus3 Summer Release - Agents not updating if offline

Hi All

Spent quite a bit of time with Solus3 over the last few months, and view many threads on here.

I was under the impression that with Agent Version 3.4.118 any machines in a Deployment that is OFFLINE would, when it came ONLINE, get the update it was intended as instructed with the Deployment.

So to break it down.

* Summer Release is Deployed to a site.

* Machines on the Site that are online get the update

* Machine that are offline do not get the update.

* The Deployment ends with a Partially Successful Message

* Agents that were offline that come online I thought should now get the update from Spring to Summer.....???

If this is correct?, this is not what I am finding and wondered if anyone else out there has witness anything similar?


Going to discuss with Capita but wanted to know what the rest of the community had experienced.

This has been an ongoing problem with SOLUS3 since an upgrade (3.4.106 or something)

However this was supposed to be fixed in 3.4.118 (Capita had assured me this would be fixed in this release :mad:)
We haven't got round to doing the update in our area yet for SOLUS and SIMS so we can't say for sure if it has not been fixed.

I will be interested to hear what Capita has got to say.

TBH, our SOLUS 3 is now on the latest version, and everything works really well, the main issue we had was I had autodeploy ticked and it installed Summer on all most machines overnight, then it got withdrawn, but as soon as Summer was available again everything was good.

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TBH, our SOLUS 3 is now on the latest version, and everything works really well

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True. When all the machines are on, connected to the server, etc SOLUS3 (usually) works fine as an install, update and monitoring client.

The problem is when you have laptops connected as well which half the school staff take home with them or some people turn their computer off at night.
The update goes out that night and when they come back the laptops/PC's don't automatically update.
That leads to a load of teachers\office staff are trying to assail the office which you call your castle trying to get you to fix their incompatible database problem (usually fixed by deploying the update again).
It gets even worse when your a LA.

Also SOLUS3 deploying the update to machines that come back online after an update is supposed to be a feature of the SOLUS3 agents.

* Update * - Capita have taken my log files to investigate the problem.

I agree with the above, when it works, it works well. BUT. We have our Solus3 DS on a single central server and hope to use the central DS to manage our 90+ sites we support. So when it Fails, it Fails dramatically!!

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Originally Posted by Wayne_K

I was under the impression that with Agent Version 3.4.118 any machines in a Deployment that is OFFLINE would, when it came ONLINE, get the update it was intended as instructed with the Deployment.

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Got Capita onsite at one of our schools tomorrow then our account manager in early next month. I predict it being fixed real soon :)

Funny, I was dealing with a school yesterday who had their first full upgrade via S3. Some XP devices were offline because the agent randomly stopped a week ago and has not come back since. The agent was started manually on these devices and as soon as they came 'online' in SOLUS3, they instantly downloaded the upgrade AND applied it even though it was outside of the scheduled deployment time! I was shocked! This is how SOLUS3 should work!

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Originally Posted by Rawns

Funny, I was dealing with a school yesterday who had their first full upgrade via S3. Some XP devices were offline because the agent randomly stopped a week ago and has not come back since. The agent was started manually on these devices and as soon as they came 'online' in SOLUS3, they instantly downloaded the upgrade AND applied it even though it was outside of the scheduled deployment time! I was shocked! This is how SOLUS3 should work!

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Hi Rawns - Im quite Jealous! :)

Can you tell me more about your setup.

Are you running the Solus3 DS locally to the clients?
How long after the 'Partially Successful' message did the offline clients come online?
Did you have any other scheduled deployments listed following the Summer Release?

Sorry to ask so many questions, I am just trying to get a clear picture in my head how our sites differ and why mine failed if yours worked so well..

(Just to add to the Solus3 fun, as I am writing this all my agents, all 140+ are offline, 90+ of these are servers that I know 100% are online - THE JOY!!)

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Originally Posted by Wayne_K

Hi Rawns - Im quite Jealous! :)

Can you tell me more about your setup.

Are you running the Solus3 DS locally to the clients?
How long after the 'Partially Successful' message did the offline clients come online?
Did you have any other scheduled deployments listed following the Summer Release?

Sorry to ask so many questions, I am just trying to get a clear picture in my head how our sites differ and why mine failed if yours worked so well..

(Just to add to the Solus3 fun, as I am writing this all my agents, all 140+ are offline, 90+ of these are servers that I know 100% are online - THE JOY!!)

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Trust me, if I was not sitting down when I heard about it, I would have passed out!!! :P

Well, we have a DS here at the LA and all schools have their own S3 environment on their own domains. We're installing S3 for schools but have only 2 trailing S3 at the moment. The network manager in the secondary site has been great and made sure all his devices are in the S3 environment. We're still fine tuning rollout scheduled, etc but at the moment, SIMS, FMS and Discover rollouts are set up to auto deploy in SOLUS3 every day between 19:00 and 10:00 and SOLUS3 is set to auto deploy every day around the clock. We've enable the 'auto download to agent' and that also runs around the clock.

In theory, we authorise the SIMS and FMS Summer upgrade at midday and it should auto download to the school, and the schools S3 environment should then push out the upgrade files to all of the machines ready for the upgrade to kick of at 7pm. Come 7pm, the upgrade starts upgrading any online machines. The next morning, any machines that were powered of are then booted up and upgraded as well. We extended the rollout time up to 10am the next day because I had doubts the S3 would upgrade any machines outside the scheduled deployment time.

Like I mentioned above, a few XP devices had issues with the Agent where it stopped for no reason on the 6th and has been offline ever since (call logged with Capita). Once the service was manually started on these machines, the were given the upgrade files and it updated them! This was after the 10ap stop time for the scheduled deployment.

We're now planning on getting more sites on S3 (mainly because a lot of them have it installed already for the rollout of Discover).

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Originally Posted by Rawns

Trust me, if I was not sitting down when I heard about it, I would have passed out!!! :P

Well, we have a DS here at the LA and all schools have their own S3 environment on their own domains. We're installing S3 for schools but have only 2 trailing S3 at the moment. The network manager in the secondary site has been great and made sure all his devices are in the S3 environment. We're still fine tuning rollout scheduled, etc but at the moment, SIMS, FMS and Discover rollouts are set up to auto deploy in SOLUS3 every day between 19:00 and 10:00 and SOLUS3 is set to auto deploy every day around the clock. We've enable the 'auto download to agent' and that also runs around the clock.

In theory, we authorise the SIMS and FMS Summer upgrade at midday and it should auto download to the school, and the schools S3 environment should then push out the upgrade files to all of the machines ready for the upgrade to kick of at 7pm. Come 7pm, the upgrade starts upgrading any online machines. The next morning, any machines that were powered of are then booted up and upgraded as well. We extended the rollout time up to 10am the next day because I had doubts the S3 would upgrade any machines outside the scheduled deployment time.

Like I mentioned above, a few XP devices had issues with the Agent where it stopped for no reason on the 6th and has been offline ever since (call logged with Capita). Once the service was manually started on these machines, the were given the upgrade files and it updated them! This was after the 10ap stop time for the scheduled deployment.

We're now planning on getting more sites on S3 (mainly because a lot of them have it installed already for the rollout of Discover).

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Thanks Rawns - Thats very interesting and has given me something to think about over the weekend.

I have my setup with the Central Server at LA level but have all the agents listed there rather than at local school server level.

I just had my concerns about the Auto Deployment, as I didn't trust Solus3 not to roll out the update automatically without me giving it the ok first!

Thanks again..

Rawns - Another quick question.

How do you deal with knowing if the site has actually updated the site? Do you just liaise with the onsite network manager?

The reason I ask is I know Capita have plans for better reporting to a Central DS at LA level in the future but they have said currently there is no way to know what the local DS on site servers are doing at upgrade time.

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Originally Posted by Wayne_K

Rawns - Another quick question.

How do you deal with knowing if the site has actually updated the site? Do you just liaise with the onsite network manager?

The reason I ask is I know Capita have plans for better reporting to a Central DS at LA level in the future but they have said currently there is no way to know what the local DS on site servers are doing at upgrade time.

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It's half the reason we set up auto-deployment. That way, we know if we authorise a release to the school, their S3 instance will download it and distribute the upgrade to the devices and will attempt to install it from 7pm onwards. We have e-mail alerts set up in each school's S3 environment so we get an e-mail with the results of the deployment, and we also have a report in our S3 DS which allows us to see whats happened in each site. It's not a great report but gives us a good heads up of how things are looking in the schools. At the moment, we're liaising with our 2 schools with how best to mop up devices. Luckly, only a handful have fallen through the net devices that fell through the net (not added to the environment, agent offline, firewall on, corroupt wmi etc). If SOLUS3 was perfect, we would not need to worry as a device would come online at any point, see it's out of date and automatically upgrade. Until then though, we have guidance on how to deploy using S3, but are in the process of bulking with some more detailed guidance.

The benefit of having an environment in each school is that the bigger schools who have their own IT support have access to their own UI to maintain their devices on the server allowing them to add new devices, redeploy upgrades, remove dud PC's. That side of things would be mental if it was the LA's responsibility to ensure every device in every school was included and up to date in the central SOLUS3 enviroment!

I know our offline agents aren't automatically updating after doing the update - previously they did do. The science labs are typically an area where power is normally off so don't get updated and that was the case this morning - had to setup a redeployment for them to be able to get the update. :(

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Originally Posted by Cache

I know our offline agents aren't automatically updating after doing the update - previously they did do. The science labs are typically an area where power is normally off so don't get updated and that was the case this morning - had to setup a redeployment for them to be able to get the update. :(

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Are the agents on .118 and reported as offline, then come online? Just we've had issue and it worked fine this time, maybe having the SIMS product manager sitting next you makes it work :p

I know if it fails 1, it won't retry until you redeploy.

Yeah they were all on .118, reported as Offline and appear as Offline in the Agent Status box.

Definitely worked fine last time....

Will have to have a bit more of a play, still got the discover update to try with.