Does the transfer key need to be renewed after every agent upgrade?

Products

• CA Automic Workload Automation - Automation Engine

Issue/Introduction

Does the transfer key need to be renewed after every agent upgrade?

Environment

Release: AOATAM99000-8.0-Automic-One Automation Tools-Application Manager
Component:

Resolution

Detailed Description and Symptoms

Some customers have been encountering the problem of having to getting the 'Transfer Key could not be loaded' message after every upgrade of an Agent. 

 
Investigation

Running the 'Renew Transfer key' resolves the problem, but should not have to be done when a simple hotfix or patch is applied to the Agent.

Solution

This problem occurs when Agents are not updated correctly. In a particular case, the customer was deleting the entirety of the Agent\bin directory and then installing the new Agent in the same location.

While this may have been a fine procedure previous to version 8.00A, with the new Agent/Server authentication (using Transfer Keys) this deletes the keystore.ini file containing the old validation information.

To perform a correct upgrade please see the documentation.  Depending upon the operating system, this usually involves either running the setup.exe and allowing the system to overwrite the agent .exe file, or simply replacing the old executable with the new executable.