Ubuntu version reporting

Usage and Config Platform
1

Hi All,

I am seeing something odd with Ubuntu installs and since I am not an Ubuntu person (only played with it) I was wondering if anyone knew why I am seeing the following reporting for a couple systems

Linux kernel (Ubuntu 7.4.0-1ubuntu1~18.04.1) (4.15.0-54-generic)
Linux kernel (Ubuntu 7.3.0-16ubuntu3) (4.15.0-46-generic)

Instead of what I am used to

Linux Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS (4.4.0-170-generic)

The first two are causing me issues because they are not subscribing to the patch sites and I was trying to update the bigfix agent and they are not relevant. This is happening because the relevance will not match to that pattern.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Martin

1 Like
2

This has happened to me in some cases, usually due to there being an unusual kernel in use that trips up the BigFix Client/Agent detection of the OS.

This is actually more likely to be a problem with Ubuntu/Debian specifically than RHEL family due to the way the agent does the detection, which is more likely to fall back to /proc/version on Ubuntu/Debian.

I’ve asked for the failback for OS detection to be handled differently to address this.

I see this especially with docker containers that share a kernel with the host rather than have their own.

I also see this with Windows 10 WSL containers.

I suppose this might also be the case for some kinds of virtualization, but in most virtualization the VM has it’s own kernel, so that would just work in most cases.

CC: @AlanM

I should follow up on this, I think we may already have an internal enhancement request for this.

You might also want to try the newest version of the agent to see if it has a fix.

  • Can you provide more info about these systems?
  • Are they containers or virtualized?
  • If so, what technology is used?
1 Like
3

You are correct, it was using the /proc/version, that is why it looked so wrong.

The system was on version 9.5.7 for the agent, so I copied the v10.0 fixlet and “fixed” the relevance so that I could deploy. After upgrading to v10, the system is reporting as “Linux Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS (4.15.0-54-generic)”.

So I am guessing that the 9.5.7 agent did not support this version of the operating system. I better get the remaining updated :slight_smile:

Just to answer your questions in case they help going forward

  1. Hopefully what I stated above helped
  2. They are virtualized
  3. They are on the IBM Cloud (used to be Softlayer).

Thanks

1 Like
4

In this case, you are having a different but related bug in which it is falling back to /proc/version just because it is a newer OS version than the Agent “supports” (but generally this is the only part it doesn’t support)

Not falling back to /proc/version so directly would address both issues.