Installing McAfee ePO Common Management Agent (CMA) on Windows Vista

If any of the systems you support are running Vista, you’ve probably come across the problem of trying to install ePO onto those machines. Framepkg.exe, the single-file installer for the CMA and ePO, doesn’t work in Vista, unless you’re running as ‘administrator.’ NB: this doesn’t mean as an administrator, but rather the built-in administrator account itself. If you just need to run the framepkg.exe, simply right-click on it and choose ‘Run as administrator.’ NB: for this to work, you must disable User Account Control in Vista. For most of us, however, we will need to run an install and specify the location of the SiteList.xml file that specificies the ePO server to contact. There are two ways to accomplish this:

1) Right-click on the command prompt icon and choose ‘Run as administrator’ This opens the command prompt as the user ‘administrator,’ and thereby allows you to run framepkg with any flags you want from the command line.

2) Most people ’script’ their install with a batch file, which includes the location of the SiteList.xml file. To replicate this, simply right-click on your batch file and choose ‘Run as administrator.’ This will install ePO Agent and CMA properly. The text of your batch file should include something like the following:

FramePkg.exe /Install=Agent /ForceInstall /SiteInfo=”%location%\Sitelist.xml”

where %location% is the location (network or on the hard drive) where you want the installer to look for the Sitelist file.

During both types of installs, the actual screen to tell you the status of the install is hidden behind the desktop. You’ll know the install is working because a prompt will appear on the taskbar for an ‘Interactive Event.’ If you choose to view this event, you’ll see the status of your ePO Agent install. You can re-exit that window to return to the Vista desktop once you receive the ‘Setup completed successfully’ message.

Jan 30, 2007

• Posted by Vasken
• 5 comments
• Musings

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