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Secure way of automatically updating windows agent?

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  • Jason
    Senior Member
    • Nov 2007
    • 430

    #1

    Secure way of automatically updating windows agent?

    With the arrival of zabbix 2.0 I'm faced with having to update the windows agent on lots of boxes to 2.0 if we want the full functionality of 2.0.

    Whilst a script to download and update the agent is trivial using either batch file or vbs (the option I've gone for) and I can even make it update the format of the config file if required.

    Ideally the script would be scheduled so it would check if there was a new version of the agent and then download it and install it automatically overnight.

    However, I'm still wondering about how to do this securely... I could host the agent zips on my zabbix server, but there is always the chance of a compromise there and then an infected agent could be automatically spread to all the windows machines which would be a disaster. I can calculate a checksum against the agent zip, but then how would this be distributed to all the machines safely?

    I had a thought that could sign/encrypt the zip file using a private key and then put the public key on the machines with the agent and so it checks if every file is signed before installing... The private key would not be kept on the zabbix server so this option is a lot safer... The problem is I cannot seem to find a way of doing this that doesn't require lots of extra software installed on the windows machine...

    Has anyone else faced this problem and how have you overcome it? Is there any (ideally free) software for signing zip files using a public key system that doesn't require lots of extra software on the windows side.
  • Tekkell
    Junior Member
    • Mar 2011
    • 15

    #2
    For the windows machines there are remote execution tools. LINK

    if you can script a little you can "push" them to your windows machines and remotely execute an installer etc.

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    • Jason
      Senior Member
      • Nov 2007
      • 430

      #3
      I've used the sysinternal tools before... Unfortunately those only work well if you're pushing out files to machines on a domain...

      I'm pushing files to different domains in disparate firewalled locations.

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      • Tekkell
        Junior Member
        • Mar 2011
        • 15

        #4
        Sorry Jason,

        I can not help you with that. I've seen it with commercial packages like Tivoli or proprierty, but don't know of an app that does it like you want it.
        It would be a nice feature if zabbix could securely update it's own agents and central config management over a secure channel. I've seen apps being distributed whith small packages along with the data, but that was proprietory software.

        Good luck,

        Tekkell

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