Agent upgrade fails with error: "Service 'ESET Remote Administrator Agent' (EraAgentSvc) could not be stopped. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to stop system services"

[frapetti 1]

Hi,

I'm having some problems upgrading from v6.4 to v6.5. Fortunately, the ERA server upgraded without issues, but when trying to upgrade the Agents with the "Remote Administrator Components Upgrade" client task from ERA console, the task failed on several computers.

I then tried to upgrade the agent locally on the computers by manually running the stand-alone agent installer with the install_config.ini created by the console for GPO deployment, but it failed with the following error: Service 'ESET Remote Administrator Agent' (EraAgentSvc) could not be stopped. Verify that you have sufficient privileges to stop system services. (see attached image).

The user running the msi agent installer was an enterprise administrator, and it certaintly had privileges to stop any kind of service, however it could not stop the agent service or kill the process. I think that something went wrong with the agent autoprotection, and is preventing even the installer from uninstalling the 6.4 agent.

The computer i tried this on has Windows XP, but there are several computers affected, some of them with Win 7, 8.1 and 10.

I then uninstalled the old agent from control panel, and then used the all-in-one installer to upgrade to 6.5, and that worked, but it's not a very good solution, as that means visiting every affected computer. Is there a way to fix whatever problem is causing the installer to not be able to stop the agent service? That seems to be the main problem.

Regards.

Edited June 15, 2017 by frapetti

[frapetti 1]

I think that i found a better solution: i used wmic to remotely uninstall the agent, with the following command:

/user:username /node:"computername" product where name="ESET Remote Administrator Agent" call uninstall

Then used the ESET Remote Deployment Tool to remotely install the All-in-one package. That worked very well on two computers. The whole unistall/reinstall process only required one reboot after the new version of ESET Endpoint Security was installed.

EDIT: However, several computers don't have the agent available in the add/remove software list, and so the wmic option isn't available for them.

Edited June 28, 2017 by frapetti