Cisco CSA 6.0 Upgrade Note

When upgrading to CSA 6.0, most of the effort is concentrated on upgrading the management center. Cisco provides fairly well documented instructions in their installation guide. The part they don't talk about enough is the CSA Agent upgrade to 6.0.

One problem I ran into has to do with upgrading clients running Windows XP SP3. According to the CSA 5.2 release notes, CSA 5.2 only supports Windows XP SP 0, 1, or 2. Of course, you can surmise that they just forgot to update their release notes with XP SP3 support, since the documentation is dated 4/2/07 and Windows XP SP3 came out on 5/6/08. Unfortunately, that is not true. This can be seen when viewing the "Host Identification" information under "Systems > Hosts > [hostname]". I've shown an example below. The "unsupported" information is shown in red.



Despite this screen, the CSA 5.2 Agent works fine after the upgrade to XP SP3. The big problem comes when the Management Center is upgraded to version 6.0 and you try to do the scheduled software update to upgrade all the agents to 6.0. This does not work. The normal process is to

1. Access "Systems > Software Updates > Scheduled Software Updates"
2. Create a new Item that schedules the update for a particular group
3. The agents check in with the Management Center, download the update, and install

The problem is that the agents never download the update. The "System > Hosts > [hostname]" page always shows that the software version as "Agent is running the latest software" instead of "Update Available". Both of these screenshots are shown below.





The only workaround is to create a new CSA 6.0 agent kit and push the new agent kit to all the users via your normal application installation mechanism (Altiris, SMS,...)