Name on remote agent changes when upgraded and sometimes on restart in agents page in administration.

[Andrew Morin]

So I have had this hapeen in both situations listed above. So today I upgraded Bamboo from 3.4.3 to 4.0.1. I also upgraded the the remote agents with the 4.0.1 jar file. When I bring the build servers back online I get the following...

Pre-Upgrade build.server (1) All custom capabilities setup.

Post-Upgrade build.server (2) I lose all custom executables, if I try to edit the name it tells me the name already exists.

Major PITA when you have ten build servers with multiple custom executables. Is there a work around for this??

[Przemek Bruski · Accepted solution]

Major PITA when you have ten build servers with multiple custom executables. Is there a work around for this??

Don't update the remote agents, because then you are essentially reinstalling them as new agents. Just start them against the upgraded server - they willl be updated automatically and all configuration data should be preserved.

[Andrew Morin]

So what if I already upgraded them is there any work around? This should be stated in the documentation. I figured we should be running the remote agent that was the same as the version of Bamboo...so much for common sense...

[Przemek Bruski]

I figured we should be running the remote agent that was the same as the version of Bamboo...so much for common sense...

Even ancient remote agents from Bamboo 2.2 can self-update to 4.0, despite completely different classloading mechanism - it would just be to much pain the make sure all the agents are up to date all the time. It's even better than that - if you install new 3rd party plugins on the server, they will be upgraded on the agents as well. Same goes for downgrading.

We sometimes mentioned that the remote agent upgrade is not needed in the upgrade guide - but after all, the upgrade guide is a bad place to list things that should not be done ;-)

[Przemek Bruski]

You can try undoing the changes to bamboo-agent-home/bamboo-agent.cfg.xml (or restore the file from backup). The content of QUEUE table in DB should be helpful if you don't have backup.

The tags that have to be restored are
<agentDefinition>/<id> and <agentDefinition>/<name> (not sure about agentUuid).

[Andrew Morin]

Note that changing the Name and ID were sufficient. UUID was not needed.

Thanks

Przemek

Still think there should be a note or warning message to not mess with remote agents :-) At least I know going forward...