Agents showing as External when they are not... usually after a reboot
Hi there... having an issue on a local network where sometimes.. especially when a client is rebooted, the agent status is set to external....
Why?
It normally sorts itself out after a few scan or an agent reinstall..
but its a bit annoying and i was wondering if I can do anything to mitigate it?
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Comments
We are announcing the End of Life (EOL) of the optional PDQ Agent beta from our existing products. See this blog post for more information https://www.pdq.com/blog/pdq-agent-status-update/
While the agent has become more stable over time I still don't feel it's ready for production use. If your clients are all internal I wouldn't use the agent at this time.
I see great potential in the agent, but it has a way to go as far as stability.
I feel that the agent starts up before the network is fully initialized (since this happens predominantly on our faster SSD based systems).
It tries to contact the internal server at startup, fails because the network isn't fully initialized, then attempts to contact the PDQ hosted server, at which time the network has had time to initialize.
An easy fix could be to add a couple of seconds for a second "internal' attempt, and only then to look for the PDQ hosted server, or maybe set the PDQ agent service to "Delayed Start".
Alternatively you could have your network admins block outgoing access to agentsapi.pdq.com on your perimiter firewall so there is no way for internal machines to ever be "external"; but such a 'fix' should not be necessary. When I'm really in a hurry and I know the machine is somewhere in the network I force a rescan or reinstall the agent.
To add to what Robert wrote, we have been monitoring, evaluating, and shaking our fists at these behavioral problems (the agent's therapist says it's an adjustment disorder -problematic, but shouldn't require institutionalization). The general release of the PDQ Inventory Agent resulted in extreme stress to our existing infrastructure, with the agent itself performing below our standards. Frankly, we weren't prepared for just how popular and widely-used it would be by y'all (think Sally Field's 1984 Oscar speech).
As such we are reverting the PDQ Inventory Agent back into beta status, which will hopefully reduce the mass adoption rate (not ready for production and all that) while we make some fundamental changes to the architecture and costs associated. We don't have a timeline on when these changes will be completed, but we're going to be thorough. The agent will still be available for non-prod consumption and for your testing pleasure.