Restarting McAfee Agent

[Jmac24]

Have some servers who's agents are not able to check into ePO. After a restart, check-in was fine.

I was hoping there was a way we could just restart the agent services on the server, but there is no option active to stop or restart them. Probably because of the self protection of McAfee services. Is there a way for me to manually do this from the server or am I stuck having to restart the servers?

[AdithyanT]

Hi @Jmac24,

Thank you for your post. No remote restart option from ePO. Not that I am aware of. However, since McAfee Agent does not require an immediate reboot after deployment, you can perform a "Deploy Agent" task from the ePO to Force install and that may help you here!

[Jmac24]

This isn't restarting a server after a deployment. I am asking about restarting the agent itself, ones that have been installed for quite a while that have stopped communicating with ePO. I am trying to put a process together to try and correct the issue without having to restart the server that the McAfee Agent is installed on. In the case yesterday where we had 2 of them, communication came back after restarting the local windows server it was on (Not ePO). So I was wondering if we could just restart the 3 ma services somehow to avoid restarting the OS.

[AdithyanT]

Hi @Jmac24,

Apologies, I may have been misunderstood here. Th re deploy of McAfee Agent triggers a restart of the Services (it re installs the Services) thereby ensuring the clients communicate back. This does not involve a machine reboot.

[Jmac24]

Got it. Thanks.

So I could just run the FrmInst.exe /INSTALL=AGENT which should take care of that? That was my other option I was thinking of.

[AdithyanT]

Hi @Jmac24,

Yes!, That should do it, or you can also use the deploy option directly from ePO and perform the task!

[cdinet]

You can also push a temporary policy to it to disable MA self protection.  Then you can restart services all you want.

[Jmac24]

Problem is we can't communicate from ePO so pushing policy changes or the agent from ePO isn't functioning...at least in these cases.

[AdithyanT]

Hi @Jmac24,

Thank you for your response. I would recommend a "Push Agent" instead of a regular deployment task from the ePO. A regular Product Deployment task required an installed communicating McAfee Agent to be in place. Push Agent is an option that we use when we do not have McAfee Agent in place(first time deployment) or when we wish to over ride an existing deployment of McAfee Agent for some reason!

For general reference:

https://docs.mcafee.com/bundle/agent-5.5.0-installation-guide-epolicy-orchestrator/page/GUID-B2BF5E7...

Also please see:

https://docs.mcafee.com/bundle/agent-5.5.0-installation-guide-epolicy-orchestrator/page/GUID-B9027EF...

McAfee ePO

You specify the systems and select one of the Push Agents options when adding a system, or Deploy Agents for systems already in the System Tree.

Selecting many systems can temporarily affect network throughput. You must specify credentials with administrator rights to the target systems.

Hope this helps!