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Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6

Here you can find the release notes for Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6. You can find the old release notes on the Snow Globe.

You can find the release notes for Package Builder on Snow Atlas in the Snow Atlas section of this page.

danger

Be aware of the following identified vulnerabilities:

6.7.2 latest​

Release date: 2023-11-22

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.7.2 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Corrections​

Scanning process

  • Excluded file systems are no longer scanned when the parent folder is included (04739213).

  • Include paths now take priority over exclusions. Exclusion rules that match an include path are removed prior to traversal. This is to allow explicitly including folders that are otherwise located on excluded file systems.

  • When file systems are excluded in the agent configuration, these now completely replace the default excluded file systems.

  • The file scanner no longer performs unnecessary traversals when an include path lacks suffixes like “*” or “\”.

6.7.1​

Release date: 2023-10-11

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.7.1 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Enhancements​

File Scanning
Version recognition for java archives

  • The priority of used fields has been changed to improve the accuracy of version recognition for jar files (04709640).

Linux agent hardware scanning
Correctly report Lenovo model on Linux

  • When the computer manufacturer is identified as Lenovo, the agent now favors the value from system-version over system-product-name (04729945)

6.7.0​

Release date: 2023-08-30

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.7.0 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Other

note

RPM and DEB packages built after 19th July 2023 now supports upgrading. Read more on Snow Atlas Releases.

Corrections​

Hardware scanning

  • Logical disk information is no longer gathered for excluded filesystems. (04706283)

  • The agent no longer appends system enclosure type to the model name and is now aligned with other Snow Inventory Agents. (04687751)

6.6.1​

Release date: 2023-05-03

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.6.1 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Corrections​

Jar scanning

  • The Windows, Linux, and macOS agents now consistently extract the same version values from JAR-files; previously the priority differed depending on the platform.

6.6.0​

Release date: 2023-04-05

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.6.0 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Enhancements​

File scanning
"Version" field fallback

  • The agent now uses “Implementation-Version” as an added fallback for the “Version” field when reading the version from Manifest.mf in JAR-files. As a result Snow Inventory Oracle Scanners are now identified as .jar files. (04624981, IDEAS-I-1893)

Corrections​

Agent updates

  • The behaviour of the agent has been changed so that files left behind in the “pending” folder are now deleted when downloading new updates. (04621873)

6.5.1​

Release date: 2023-03-15

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.5.1 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Enhancements​

Scanning process

  • For Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS version 8 or later, the agent now differentiates between Workstation and Server using the “System Purpose” as set by the system-supplied command “subscription-manager”. The “System Purpose” must be configured by the system owner in order for the agent to identify the OS type. (04577268)

6.5.0​

Release date: 2023-02-01

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.5.0 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Enhancements​

Communication
Agent to server communication

  • When the “send” command is run on the command line and there are no snowpacks available on the device the agent no longer calls home, reducing unnecessary communications with the server.

Scanning
'Fuse' filesystem exclusion

  • For the Inventory Agent for Linux the ‘fuse’ filesystem is now excluded by default, and no longer needs to be configured manually. (04606621)

Linux distribution version retrieval

  • The agent can now retrieve the minor as well as the major version of the CentOS7 version. (04607220)

6.4.3​

Release date: 2022-10-19

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.4.3 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Corrections​

Hardware scanning

  • The Linux agent now correctly identifies the NIC name when multiple NICs are installed on the system. (04594923)

6.4.2​

Release date: 2022-09-07

Compatibility
Snow Inventory Agent for Linux 6.4.2 is compatible with the following versions:

Snow Inventory Server
6.6.0 or later

Enhancements​

File scanning

  • Depending on the system hardware specifications, file scanning may now run in a shorter time thanks to parallel execution.

6.4.1​

Release date: 2022-05-24

Complete release notes  is found here

Enhancements​

  • System identification: In order to secure complete inventory for Linux computers, the agent now uses the system command dnsdomainname as a fallback step to retrieve the domain name information from the system. (04537576)

Corrections​

  • When matching certain filenames, the agent scanning process filename comparison is no longer case-sensitive.

  • Hypervisor detection: To prevent proxies from forwarding HTTP requests to link-local IP addresses (169.254.x.x), use of proxies is explicitly disabled in the call used to detect Azure hypervisors. (04538696)

  • Java Archives (.jar files) without a name in their META-INF/MANIFEST.MF are once again included in the scan result. (04560088)

  • Exclusion paths now allow the use of the exp: prefix to do full-path matching instead of by directory/file part. (04561284)

  • The agent now falls back to use system command dnsdomainname as a last resort to get the domain name information from the system. (04537576)

6.4.0​

Release date: 2021-10-27

Complete release notes  is found here

Enhancements​

  • The agent’s file system scanner has been refactored to enable inclusion and exclusion rules for both path and file-name patterns.

  • The agent now collects system identifiers for virtual machines running on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, and Google Cloud Compute Engine.

  • The agent reports the resulting status of scanning the computer for swidtag files, together with the resulting content; this will enable future releases of Snow Inventory Server and Snow License Manager to better handle recognition of added, removed, or changed software.

Corrections​

  • The agent does not report the IP address in the scan results manifest when the configuration file’s “privacy.hide_ip” setting has the value “false”.

  • The agent collects information on the Java runtime environment installation from its manifest instead of the executable output (04512839).

  • The agent correctly reports the path of files where the name ends in “.sys”.

  • The agent does not create a web metering subdirectory in its data directory (04500716).

  • The agent collects the Common Platform Enumeration information to correctly identify the operating system edition (04497878, 04507255).

  • The agent continues scanning when failing to detect a cloud-based hypervisor due to restrictions on network connectivity (04497522).

  • Leveraging the new file system scanner, the agent can now be configured to exclude files with names ending in specified patterns (also known as “file extensions”) (04472502).

6.3.1​

Release date: 2021-03-17

Complete release notes  is found here

New​

  • The agent correctly includes the logs in the .snowpack scan-result file (04467427).

6.3.0​

Release date: 2021-02-17

Complete release notes  is found here

New​

  • Collecting asset identifiers: The Agent can now collect asset identifiers like the asset tag and report it in the inventory scan results.

Enhancements​

  • Using !autheticate in the sudoers file to elevate command execution: When the Agent is run within a non-root user context, it can now elevate command execution using sudo when the user running the agent has the !authenticate option set in the sudoers file.

  • Update to the curl libraries used by the agent: The curl libraries used by the agent have been updated to version 7.71.1.

Corrections​

  • Laptops are now correctly recognized as portable computers (04413990).

6.2.3​

Release date: 2020-06-17

Complete release notes  is found here

Corrections​

  • The Agent for Linux now implements an improved logic to detect processor information (PRB0043221).

  • The Agent now correctly reports the attributes Manufacturer and Model for VMware virtual machines, a typo has been corrected (PRB0043227).

  • The Agent now successfully completes the scan on RedHat Enterprise Linux 8 and CentOS 8.1 when rpm packages have been removed from the system.

6.2.2​

Release date: 2020-04-01

Complete release notes  is found here

Corrections​

  • The Agent now correctly reports encoded data for the Dynamic inventory feature when the data spans multiple lines. This feature is commonly used together with the Snow Inventory Oracle Middleware Scanner.

6.2.1​

Release date: 2019-11-27

Complete release notes  is found here

Corrections​

  • The Agent now creates a valid snowpack when one of the files to be included in the snowpack is 0 bytes long. (PRB0042505).

6.2.0​

Release date: 2019-09-25

Complete release notes  is found here

New​

  • It is now possible to configure the Agent to never retrieve updates from its configured endpoint(s).

Corrections​

  • The agent now correctly parses the output of the dmidecode command version 3.2 and newer and retrieves manufacturer and model (PRB0042519).

  • The agent now removes empty snowpack files to prevent issues with some external proxy configuration (PRB0042533).

6.1.1​

Release date: 2019-06-27

Complete release notes  is found here

New​

  • Support for TLS 1.3: The Snow Inventory Agent for Linux now supports the TLS 1.3 protocol when communicating with the configured endpoints. This capability is not supported in Inventory Server yet.

Corrections​

  • When retrieving the login events on some Linux distribution, the agent incorrectly appended the login date to the username, resulting in incorrect entries for the user list. The logic of this functionality has been corrected, and users are now reported with the correct name (PRB0042373).

  • The agent will now report the system enclosure type as unknown (value of 2) when the relevant data can’t be read.

6.1.0​

Release date: 2019-05-16

New​

  • Public key pinning.

  • Exclude autofs mount points from the file scan

Enhancements​

  • Support for new chassis types

  • Operating-system name in the manifest

  • Deprecated Linux commands

Corrections​

  • The agent parses SMBIOS information retrieved from the local machine so that BIOS version numbers of more than two levels, such as n.n.n, are now extracted correctly and the correct hardware/vendor information is displayed in Snow License Manager.

  • Additional logic has been added to ensure that additional command-line parameters passed to the agent are also picked up by the Snow Inventory Oracle Scanner (PRB0041871).

  • The Snow Linux Agent can once again be configured using a relative path for the custom encryption key.

  • The query used by the Linux Agent to extract information about rpm installed packages was logging an error when running a scan for the first time. This issue has been resolved so that the error is no longer logged and the agent collects information about installed packages (PRB0041915).

  • In previous versions, the Linux Agent was querying the local machine for rpm installed packages multiple times. Additional intelligence has been added to reduce the number of times the agent performs this query, reducing the amount of time it takes to complete a scan (PRB0041914).

  • Additional logic has been implemented to prevent computers from incorrectly reporting as Amazon Elastic Cloud (PRB0041917).

6.0.0​

Release date: 2018-10-23

New​

  • Support for additional types of inventory information.

Enhancements​

  • To ease troubleshooting, the agent now logs the full pathnames of the locations it scans.

  • OpenSSL library has been updated from version 1.0.2 to 1.0.2n.

  • cURL library has been updated from version 7.40 to 7.58.0.

  • Zlib library has been updated from version 1.2.08 to 1.2.11.

Corrections​

  • Invalid (non UTF-8) characters are no longer included in inventory scan files (snowpack) but are now replaced with the valid character.

  • The Snow Inventory Oracle Scanner (SIOS) now executes correctly even if the inventory agent is run from a different working directory. The SIOS executable must, however, be placed in the same location as the agent (PRB0041359).

  • Instead of returning a count of 1, the agent now calculates the correct CPU count for virtualized environments containing multiple Linux virtual servers with identical physical IDs.(PRB0041430)

  • Amazon Linux AMI versions 2016.03 and 2014.3 are now recognized by the agent.(PRB0041486)

  • The Model and Manufacturer data are now stored correctly for Parallels desktop Environments

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