Stop the Deployment Solution Agent in Linux Automation

There may be times when you want to test a command or script on the Linux Automation image but don't want to go through all of the hassle of creating a new job, running said job, making a fix, running the job again, etc.

The best way to do testing for scripts/commands is to kill off the agent after it starts. This is a relatively easy task but requires a little bit of speed and quick thinking.

The process is simple. Boot into your Linux automation image (PXE, USB, Cdrom, etc) and wait until you see this prompt

/#

This means you have the ability to type in commands. The "/" is the current working directory and the "#" means you are root. Quickly type in this command

ps ux | grep altiris

The first part of this command shows all running processes on the machine. The "|", or the pipe, sends the output of the first command (ps ux) to the next command. In this case the next command is "grep". Grep searches through text line-by-line with a given pattern. We set the pattern to "altiris" so grep returns every line that has the word altiris in it.

You'll get some output that looks like this

root   2624 0.0 0.0  1580  368 ?    S  14:31  0:00 /opt/altiris/deployment/adlagent/bin/adlagent -nodaemon
root   2649 0.0 0.0  1564  260 ?    S  14:31  0:00 /opt/altiris/deployment/adlagent/bin/adl_automation -watchdog

Now what we're interested in is the numbers in the 2nd column, in this case the numbers are 2624 and 2649. These numbers are the pids, or the Process IDs, of the running process. With those numbers, we can use the "kill" command to stop those processes. For this example, I would run...

kill 2624 2649

This would stop both of the programs which would allow us to use the environment to our hearts desire. Now if for whatever reason we want to restart the agent, we can simply type this command.

source /etc/rc.agent

This should start the agent back up again.