Unix Altiris Agent install fails and returns error: Failed to find the target installation root dir

Products

• IT Management Suite

Issue/Introduction

The installation of the Altiris Agent for Unix, Linux and Mac fails with the following error:

Failed to find the Altiris Agent installation root dir
Failed to find the target installation root dir

There may or may not be another error regarding the agent being already installed.

Environment

ITMS 8.x

Cause

Undetermined. It may be related to a previous installation in another directory.

Resolution

In this situation, on a Solaris 10 client computer, it was tested using a browser to connect to the Notification Server's NSCAP directory and downloaded each component of the agent installation individually. The agent directory is nscap\bin\UNIX\Agent\Solaris\x86 and all eight files were downloaded.

Proceeded with the following steps:

• chmod 755 agent-upgrade
• chmod 755 rollout*
• agent-upgrade -reinstall -dir=/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent

At this point, the previous installation was removed and the new installation proceeded, as expected. However, since a Notification Server's name was not specified, the configuration did not complete and the Altiris process was not started. It may be possible to run the agent-upgrade with an Notification Server name, e.g.: 

      agent-upgrade myns7servername  -reinstall  -dir=/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent

Then ran "/opt/altiris/notification/nsagent/bin/aex-configure -iconfigure", specified the Notification Server name at the first prompt, accepted the default values for the remaining prompt.

The Altiris process started and the client computer was able to communicate properly with the Notification Server.