At the moment in order to install agents on multiple target clients and copy over the same customised file (ex. agent.cfg), the available solution is to use the Service tab of the Discovery tool (or the Collector).

However in Enterprises infrastructure where there are hundreds+ of remote clients which need the agent installed and those are located across highly segmented networks, it become hard to populate the ip range sections to identify the right clients.

Note that if no ip ranges can be added to whatever reason, you have to use the sftp-transfer to get the scanned data to the Discovery Tool Server and the settings for this need to be provided through the agent.cfg file.

Therefore many of our customers would like to use the SCCM MS tool to deploy/install the agents and also to copy over agent.cfg and/or patterns files.

However by using SCCM for this matter, the following issues have been reported when taking into consideration Agent.cfg file as example:

• If the file is copied after the installation, the configuration works, but it is not possible to verify successful copy operation, since “file exists” is always true and “file last modified” gets touched and updated, the moment the service kicks in, and writes the file with a new date (and modifies “NextScanDate”)
• If the modified Agent.cfg file is copied and present before the installation, the installer replaces it with the default file. So no communication can occur (missing credentials)
  If the Agent.cfg is only modified by means of xml content remediation the password gets discarded, the other settings persist
• if the file is replaced by Group Policy Preferences, there will be an old file (hence “NextScanDate” in the past), and a scan will be triggered everytime the file gets written back / every gpupdate.

Suggestions:

• It would be great if the mechanism to add/update the NextScanDate for the agent would be changed in order to guarantee full supportability for widely used SCCM tool for sysadmins.
• As an alternative we should provide instructions for customers to customise the installer in order that a custom file (agent.cfg) can be used.