Client does not want to update from 11.6 to 12.0

[A Former User]

I recently updated my Fog server from 11.6 to 12.0.

After the update, the fog client on all Windows machines does not want to update from 11.6 to 12.0.

This is what the log says:

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------ClientUpdater--------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
01/10/2020 15:57 Client-Info Client Version: 0.11.16
01/10/2020 15:57 Client-Info Client OS:      Windows
01/10/2020 15:57 Client-Info Server Version: 1.5.9
01/10/2020 15:57 Middleware::Response Success
01/10/2020 15:57 Middleware::Communication Download: http://fog.domain.com/fog/client/SmartInstaller.exe
01/10/2020 15:57 ClientUpdater ERROR: Unable to parse versions
01/10/2020 15:57 ClientUpdater ERROR: Value cannot be null.
Parameter name: authority
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

the domain fog.domain.com is obfuscated for security reasons.
I see the smartinstaller.exe being downloaded in the /tmp folder.

All our clients are Windows 10, the machine on which I tested has all updates installed.
Windows Defender is turned on. I also tried it with Windows Defender turned off, but that gives the same result.

Where can I look for additional clues?

Thanks,
Jurgen.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Jurgen-Goedbloed I had a look through the code and I am fairly sure this is caused by the old code signing cert has lost validity on the 7th of September 2020. This cert is only used to ensure the binaries are certified by the FOG project team. We updated the code signing cert in January 2020 and released FOG 1.5.8 together with fog-client 0.11.19.

Unfortunately I kind of lost sight of this “major” change that would affect auto-updating after 7th of September 2020 and never officially announced that people should update earlier for the auto-update to work.

So from the version number we see in your log file I am sure you updated from FOG 1.5.7 to 1.5.9 - skipping the fog-client update that introduced the new code signing cert. This would have worked perfectly fine while the old code signing cert was still valid but fails now.

You’ll need to update all your fog-client installations to 0.11.19 (auto-update to 0.12.0 will work from there) or 0.12.0 through some other kind of software deployment mechanism I am afraid.

For now you should manually edit /var/www/html/fog/lib/fog/system.class.php and set FOG_CLIENT_VERSION back to 0.11.16 or clients will keep downloading the SmartInstaller.exe binary over and over again and put load on your FOG server for no reason. The code is smart enough to handle a situation where you have FOG_CLIENT_VERSION set to 0.11.16 version but the fog-client on some or all of your machines is on 0.12.0 already. So don’t worry about this.

[iPaulis]

I’ve found myself in this situation where many of my hosts are stuck in this 0.11.16 version and I was assuming they would eventually update themselves, but now I see they won’t.
I’m assuming there is no way to force update them, right?
I am managing a whole building with hundreds of computers, so it would be helpful to have a way of knowing which of my hosts have this old client and need manual updating, and which ones are already updated.
Is there any log or exported info where fog server could show which client version its hosts are using to sync with the server? something like how the fog client shows the fog server version that it is connecting to, but the other way around.