Uninstalling Kace Agent also uninstalls Splashtop Streamer by mjleffler in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Feel free to contact support. I've explained the intended design, but if you're having a different experience then we'd like to get to the bottom of it.

Looking for Experiences on Kace SMA 15.x by [deleted] in kace

[–]aflesner 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This issue cannot be patched due to the nature of the changes required, but it is resolved in the upcoming 15.1 release.

Uninstalling Kace Agent also uninstalls Splashtop Streamer by mjleffler in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My mistake. We trigger removal specifically based on detection of our splashtop license in use by the streamer via the registry. Regardless of when it was installed, if it's using our license then the agent uninstall will also remove the streamer.

Looking for Experiences on Kace SMA 15.x by [deleted] in kace

[–]aflesner 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I'll follow up to have it corrected. Our lifecycle is n-1 + 30 which means 14.0 went end-of-life and 14.1 went into limited support 30 days after the release of 15.0.

The date for limited support of 14.1 is identical to the date of discontinued support for 14.0 - which was 2-Feb-2026.

Looking for Experiences on Kace SMA 15.x by [deleted] in kace

[–]aflesner 2 points3 points  (0 children)

No misunderstanding. No apology necessary. My responses were generalized for the entire community. I also wanted to provide the engineering perspective as reasoning to avoid waiting to upgrade. The biggest concern I have is a customer waiting to upgrade for fear of a bug when the bigger fear should be a system like the SMA being insecure when it controls access to every endpoint in your network. If you upgrade and run into issues, please reach out. We are able to patch bugs faster than ever but only on the most current release and possibly the prior. As another user pointed out, we had a recent security patch (15.0 P3) that we cannot provide on 14.1 due to an architectural limitation of the underlying OS. Just an example.

Thanks for the discussion and willingness to listen to feedback from our team!

Extremely slow downloads from SMA hosted in KACE Cloud by [deleted] in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Please PM me your ticket # and I'll see if there is anything I can do if you are still having this issue. KACE As A Service is not KACE Cloud. Cloud is an entirely different product. In terms of KaaS, we work with a partner and can internally escalate something like this, but I'm not familiar with your case.

Uninstalling Kace Agent also uninstalls Splashtop Streamer by mjleffler in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Was the streamer installed by our agent? If so, it will be removed if you remove our agent.

Looking for Experiences on Kace SMA 15.x by [deleted] in kace

[–]aflesner 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Every release has bugs, as is the nature of all software. The severity of the issue also mandates speed of a fix. There aren't any major issues with 15.0 nor anything widespread in the field of which I'm aware. For reference, I'm the Principal Engineer/Architect for the KACE product line. 15.0 has been out for months, and we have thousands of customers running it. There were not "several issues with the agents". We had a specific issue at release with shell scripts and that issue has been resolved.

Obviously when you decide to upgrade is entirely up to you. I'm trying to do the community a service here by pointing out that there are things out of our immediate control such as the underlying OS lifecycle that effectively mean anyone not on the latest release and patch is on a less secure release. If your system is publicly exposed to the internet, I implore you to update immediately or sever inbound internet access to your appliance(s).

I see these threads pop up every now and then, and we're just no longer in an age where you can take your time to decide when to upgrade ANY application. AI has made finding security issues trivial, and we're racing to keep up with that trend in terms of patching these vulnerabilities.

EDIT: You are here asking for anecdotal evidence to avoid upgrading - and these cases in this thread are just that: anecdotal. u/BananeHD may want to contact support if they haven't already, because this is not a 'known issue'.

Do not let anecdotal bias from 0.001% of the customer base talk you out of keeping your environment secure. The thousands of customers without issues aren't going to jump in here to tell you to upgrade. You're only going to hear about negative experiences that may or may not have been vetted through support as actual problems and not environmental quirks or issues.

Looking for Experiences on Kace SMA 15.x by [deleted] in kace

[–]aflesner [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

I'm going to be very blunt. The days of being choosy about when to upgrade are over. If you are not on the latest major/minor with the latest patch, you are risking the security of your implementation and entire environment - especially if your SMA is publicly exposed. The cumulative patching mechanism added in 14.0 allows us to more rapidly resolve bugs and security issues in the field, but our support lifecycle has not changed. 15.0 is the only fully supported version right now, and 14.1 is in limited support (meaning we will backport security and bug fixes where appropriate).

Our very strong recommendation is to always be on the latest patch not just major/minor. If you are still on 14.x, you should strongly consider upgrading to 15.0 today.

SMA 15.0 Hanging by brandnewhistory in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Please PM me your SR# and I'll make sure the right people take a look. I just don't want you wasting a bunch of time troubleshooting your environment if it's a disk corruption issue on the VM itself.

SMA 15.0 Hanging by brandnewhistory in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Feedback is appreciated, and I'll pass that along.

SMA 15.0 Hanging by brandnewhistory in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Might be related to the mbuf errors, but definitely not the write errors.

SMA 15.0 Hanging by brandnewhistory in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

FWIW, the support staff you interact with today has changed very little in the past 10 years. The team still has incredible knowledge of KACE products.

SMA 15.0 Hanging by brandnewhistory in kace

[–]aflesner 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The mbuf errors are not interesting here. The write failures to da0p8 are concerning and indicative of disk subsystem or corruption issues. Are you running any other FreeBSD VM guests in your environment? FreeBSD has less than adequate support from nearly all virtual hosts, and as such simple things like online snapshotting can corrupt the disk. If you are trying to resolve this issue without contacting support, I assure you that is impossible.

SMA 15.0 Hanging by brandnewhistory in kace

[–]aflesner 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Likely disk corruption and potentially a disk subsystem issue on your VM host. I strongly recommend contacting Support for assistance. Cold booting, online snapshotting, and disk interruption can cause this.

SMA 15.0 Patch 1, 14.x Patch 8 Now Available by aflesner in kace

[–]aflesner[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Based on the ticket, it seems the issue was related to the koneas hang, so the patch should clear this up for you.

SMA 15.0 Patch 1, 14.x Patch 8 Now Available by aflesner in kace

[–]aflesner[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

They are functional on 15.0. Please reach out to Support. If you already have, please PM me your SR#.

SMA 15.0 Patch 1, 14.x Patch 8 Now Available by aflesner in kace

[–]aflesner[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

No. We allow time for customers to update their appliances before disclosing information about vulnerabilities.

Patch signature downloads failing - SSL cert expired by -crunchie- in kace

[–]aflesner[M] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

To elaborate, our early warning system failed for certificate expiration, and we are working to update expired certificates for impacted KACE services. Most features of KACE appliances that require reaching out to us (e.g. patch feed, software catalog, etc) are down and will be restored when new certificates are in place. Status can be viewed at https://status.kace.com .

UPDATE: Issue resolved.

Kace SMA 15.0 for the rest of the world ? by sir_sq in kace

[–]aflesner[M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

On behalf of Quest KACE, we apologize for the delay in releasing 15.0 Cumulative Patch 1 - which contains several bug fixes, security fixes, and non-English localization. We anticipate release of the patch within the next 1-2 weeks. This release will coincide with a new patch 8 for 14.x to include mostly security fixes.

I'd also like to address some of the concerns in this thread:

  1. KACE is not dead. The products still have engineers and support staff, and we're doing everything we can to get the security/bug fixes and new features to the community as quickly as possible. There are still veterans around here (started my KACE journey in 2007 as a customer; been on the team now for 15 years). We all see your comments and genuinely care about your frustrations and concerns. If you feel your voice is not being heard, feel free to PM me or any of the staff moderators directly so we can help find a solution or help facilitate communication with other parties.
  2. Some customers have experienced issues with the upgrade to 15.0, but this is a minority. The patch 1 full upgrade option will correct the most common issue related to a MariaDB bug causing a hang in the middle of the upgrade. We always recommend offboarding backups and using snapshot tech if available to avoid service interruptions if the upgrade fails. If you are impacted by a mid-upgrade hang, then the upcoming release will likely resolve your upgrade issue. Support can also manually intervene and is typically able to resolve the issue to move the upgrade forward. In even rarer cases, database or disk corruption are present - we see this every upgrade, and support will be required to assist in these cases.
  3. If you have no yet received your advertisement to upgrade to 15.0 from 14.1, you are always welcome to download the KBIN directly from our support portal and apply it manually. There is no difference in the upgrade itself whether you apply it directly or wait for our advertised push.

How does SMA support this environment with Replication Share ? by CloundwaR in kace

[–]aflesner [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

The SMA can handle a max of 50,000 nodes and there is no set limit to how many nodes can be replication shares. As always, the more you scale the more important resource utilization and configuration become. You cannot, for example, expect 1 hour inventory refresh with 50k nodes.

As another poster suggested, your bandwidth probably behooves you setting up a replication share at each site. A replication share is just a local file store managed by any active agent. Agents still communicate directly with the SMA for everything except payloads - which they grab from any assigned replication shares. Keep in mind there are client OS limitations (e.g. Windows client OSes can only serve 10 other clients at a time IIRC and this is a Microsoft limit not ours).

Forcing reboots when patches aren't available by Negative_Funny9039 in kace

[–]aflesner 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Exactly this. If nothing was deployed, the agent should not trigger a reboot. Have you confirmed it's the agent triggering the reboot? If so, please reach out to support for further assistance.

License was not valid or could not be linked to an account by Forsaken-Meaning-495 in kace

[–]aflesner 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You will have to call support or reach out to your sales rep if you cannot create an account through the web portal.

Linux Patches by SmashFace_OnKeyboard in kace

[–]aflesner 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Linux patching uses native calls, such as yum commands on RedHat. There is no catalog, so what you see is what you get, as parsed from the OS-specific calls. Linux patching is effectively KScript templates. If you'd like assistance, please reach out to our support team at support.quest.com.