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Updating the Patchman agent

We strongly suggest using the auto-update feature, as described in this article. Relying on auto-update decreases maintenance and ensures you will always automatically use the most up-to-date version of the Patchman software.

The Patchman agent, running on the servers you add to the Portal, is updated regularly to resolve bugs and introduce new features. Updating the Patchman agent only requires you to update the package using your package manager. 

We recommend adding the updating of the Patchman agent to your regular update schedule. However, if you need to manually update the agent, you can use the following commands:

If you are using CentOS, you can use:

CODE
yum update patchman-client

or

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dnf update patchman-client

If you are using Debian or Ubuntu, you can use:

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apt-get update
apt-get install patchman-client

After updating the agent, the service should restart automatically and you should see the new version number appear in the Portal (under Servers). 

On rare occasions customers reported that the agent refuses to stop, in that case a manual restart is required.

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service patchman restart

If the restart fails, there is probably a long-running task that prevents the agent from restarting immediately. The logfiles in /var/log/patchman/ will point out that the shutdown signal was received by the process, and will be processed as soon as possible. If the process hasn't restarted after 10 minutes, please contact support@patchman.co and send along the logfiles for further inspection.

Although we strive to maximize compatibility, we may occassionally drop support for outdated agent versions. Your agent will then not be able to connect to the Portal, meaning that new detections will not be reported and existing detections can't be resolved.

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