Things that went wrong during the HP SiteScope upgrade

Intro
These are my notes of all the stupid things I did during my attempt to upgrade to HP SiteScope version 11.24 in response to a security problem in earlier releases. When you don’t do these things very often you totally forget what you did last time!

The details
I managed to download the “patch,” SIS_00314, from the HP Passport site. That was relatively straightforward.

First mistake: winging it
After baking up my configuration I looked into the zip file and saw an rpm that seemed like the thing I needed: packages/HPSiS1124Core-11.24.241-Linux2.4.rpm. So I decided to just install it directly. That created deep directories like this one:

/opt/HP/SiteScope/installation/HPSiS1124/flvr/SiteScope

and it really looked like it wasn’t going to do anything. And when I tried that with the Java package all kinds of dependent libraries were not found. So I removed that package and went back to the manual.

So I identified the included deployment guide and skimmed through that for inspiration. It seems you should drive the installation through the file HPSiS1124_11.24_setup.bin. So I tried it. First I had to set up my X-Windows stuff:

# vncserver :2
# export DISPLAY=:2.0
(then connect to that display using VNC client)
# xhost +
and to test it (the following command should pop up a new window):
# gnome-terminal

Then finally:

# ./HPSiS1124_11.24_setup.bin

Preparing to install...
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...
Unpacking the JRE...
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
 (i) Checking display ...
 (-) Display may not be properly configured
Please make sure the display is set properly...

I don’t know what went wrong, but I knew a GUI install was out of the question without a lot of digging. I also knew about silent or console installs. So I looked to that part of the deployment manual.

# ./HPSiS1124_11.24_setup.bin -i silent

Preparing to install...
Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...
Unpacking the JRE...
Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...
Configuring the installer for this system's environment...
Preparing SILENT Mode Installation...
 
===============================================================================
                                       (created with InstallAnywhere by Zero G)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
=======================================================
 
Installer User Interface Mode Not Supported
 
Unable to load and to prepare the installer in console or silent mode.
 
=======================================================

I learned this happens if you run silent mode but have a DISPLAY environment variable set! Just unset DISPLAY and re-run.

But that didn’t work out for me either. In /tmp/HPOvInstaller/HPSiS1124_11.24 the file HPSiS1124_11.24_2014.08.11_15_39_HPOvInstallerLog.txt showed:

…
2014-08-11 15:39:40,065 INFO – Checking free disk space… [FAILED]
…

However since it was a silent installation it never complained! I only knew there was a problem when I restarted SiteScope and saw it was still showing me version 11.23.

I cleared some more space and the install finally completed successfully.

Conclusion
We ran into quite a few problems doing a simple minor HP SiteScope upgrade, most of our own making. But we persevered and are now running version 11.24.

References
Yearning for the old Freshwater SiteScope? You’ll want to read this blog posting and comments.
The Secunia advisory.