Lost all managed preferences and license software after JSS upgrade from 8.7 to 9.0

[suleymantwana]

We have just upgraded our development JSS server from 8.71 to 9.0 and lost all our managed prefs and licensed software! Is this supposed to happen? What the solutions are to bring it back without redoing all that manually? We have 99 managed preferences and 140 licensed software.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

[franton]

All that information is in your JSS database. You're probably going to have to restore it from backup if you desperately need it back. Installing Casper 9 makes major changes to the table structure (as I found from beta testing), so your only recourse is as follows:

1) Stop the tomcat process
2) Delete the database
3) Restore from your backups
4) Restart the tomcat process
5) Pray it doesn't break it again.

If it breaks again, you'll need as much info to give your JAMF representative.

[franton]

btw, hello suleyman! It's been a very long time! I hope you're doing well at Bauer :)

[easyedc]

Same thing happened to me. I, however, had something broken and was unable to process a backup of my database. The only major thing that seems to be missing from my MCX were Chrome management.

[jbrucato]

I ran into the same thing today. NONE of my MCX managed preference came over. I ended up having to downgrade back to 8.71. After I downgraded JSS said that I had an expired Tomcat certificate so I renewed it (its the self assigned from JAMF). I hope this doesn't cause any issues!

-John

[suleymantwana]

Hi Richard. It's good to hear from you and hope you're doing well! Thanks for the feedback. Restoring the database will be my first course of action.

[franton]

I'm not too far from you in Holborn these days, doing pretty much what you're doing ;)

Another tip that I just got from our account manager is to increase the max packet size on your database configuration to something bigger than the defaults. He apparently upped it to 1 Gb as it seems v9 JSS can send bigger packets than the 8.x version.

[suleymantwana]

After restoring the database, I got the error message below:

Fatal Error

The following error was encountered during initialization:

Error creating Certificate Authority

Please contact JAMF Support to help resolve this issue:
Create a ticket online at support.jamfsoftware.com
Email support@jamfsoftware.com
Call United States Support: (612) 216-1296
Call Europe Support: +44 (20) 3002 3907
Call Australia Support: +61 (02) 8014 9329

[suleymantwana]

After deleting the db and recreating a new one and restoring the 8.71 database, now we get the below error message:

HTTP Status 500 -

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

java.lang.NullPointerException com.jamfsoftware.jss.frontend.JSSAccessFilter.isAccessible(JSSAccessFilter.java:76) com.jamfsoftware.jss.frontend.JSSAccessFilter.doFilter(JSSAccessFilter.java:46) com.jamfsoftware.jss.frontend.JSSLoadingFilter.doFilter(JSSLoadingFilter.java:132)
note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Apache Tomcat/7.0.42 logs.

[franton]

We are getting that too on our test JSS setup. My last post contains the suggestion from our account manager to fix this. I won't get to try this until Tuesday unfortunately. If it doesn't work, I'm out of ideas.

[fuzzylogiq]

The exact same thing has happened to me, lost all MCX after upgrading from 8.71 to 9.0, and I've noticed some extremely screwy behaviour with entering MCX in 9.0, the web app seems buggy in Safari and then certain MCX domains (like the com.apple.scheduler.byhost) delete the entire policy when you set them and click Save! Try it yourself, make a test MCX profile in 9.0, go into Edit mode, go to Apple Scheduler Settings, click the plus next to Absolute Schedule and try to save the default settings. On my JSS i then get "the page requested could not be found" and the whole of that MCX profile has disappeared

I'm not sure if this is because it had difficulty importing my previous MCX, but I get this in the tomcat logs whenever I try to make any changes to MCX:

2013-08-28 10:48:13,982 [ERROR] [Tomcat-1053] [JAXBPlistParser ] - Error unmarshalling
2013-08-28 10:48:13,982 [ERROR] [Tomcat-1053] [edPreferenceProfileHelper] - Error reading ManagedPreferenceProfile:
java.lang.NullPointerException

Has anyone had their MCX come through the upgrade intact?

[maxbehr]

Apparently this is normal to lose MCX https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=338 . I didn't see this in the release notes.

[acdesigntech]

Same here - all my MCX profiles were dropped. Our TAM is saying that they're seeing the entire MCX table being dropped if there are any custom payloads in the managed preferences - i'm assuming not even ones that are part of a profile. The KB doesn't cover this....

I double checked our profiles on our production server, and only one profile uses anything other than integer, real, boolean, or string.

[suleymantwana · Accepted solution]

Thanks Richard. This a defect in version 9 and JAMF is aware of. It's more to do with custom MCX that v9 can not associate with manifests! We have a promise from Jamf that it will be fixed in the next update.

[franton]

Oh hell really? We'll not be upgrading to Casper 9 any time soon then.

[mvanvliet]

Dang, good thing I did not jump on the upgrade boat. Learned from years of doing this stuff to never go after a .0 (point zero) release.
Looks like the Jamf boys have some work ahead of them to fix upgrade issues not to mention the other bugs i am reading about.
- Jeez, not something I am use to seeing from Jamf.

[mm2270]

Yeah, we're in the same boat. Not doing this upgrade until this and a few other issues get resolved.
In addition to all our Managed Preferences not coming over, we also saw any Smart Groups that used Extension Attribute criteria not get fully moved over. Any criteria that was from the built in options were OK and appeared in the Smart Groups. But anything from EAs didn't make it. So some of our Smart Groups that are based on a single EA value are basically blank shells with no criteria.
And there are more issues, but I'll stop there.

I agree, not used to seeing this kind of release from JAMF. I appreciate that this was almost a complete rewrite of the software and its bound to have bugs and issues, but I would have expected that it stay in beta a little longer to get some of this stuff worked out before a release to the public. Anyway, looking forward to the upcoming point releases.

[rtrouton]

Yikes, I hadn't noticed that smart groups that used Extension Attribute criteria didn't get brought over properly. Just verified that on my own test server and no, they hadn't.

[acdesigntech]

I have to agree. We will not be seeing 9.0 in it's current state here. hopefully a .1 release will be out soon. I'd be ok if at the very least the MCX profiles, smart groups, and missing building/dept location values were taken care of.

[mm2270]

@Rich, while I'm sorry to hear you're seeing the same issue with SGs and EA values, I'm also glad its not just us. For some of the issues I've brought up, its been vague on whether the issue is something unique to our environment or a more widespread issue. Your experience seems to confirm that its not just us.

[Bukira]

seeing the same issues with our test version as you guys are having

[mm2270]

I just noticed that 9.01 is now out, as of yesterday it looks like. Release notes mention getting a fix in place for the lost Managed Preferences. We'll have to restore our test server back to version 8.71 and try the upgrade again with this release.
I see a few other fixes in here some others have reported, such as Smart Group logic getting out of whack after the upgrade among some other things.

[acdesigntech]

Yes! I've been testing since Friday and the smart group logic seems fixed. I am restoring my db again to test the mcx settings. Will get to see on Tue if it worked!

[mm2270]

We did our upgrade to 9.01 off a clean db restore. After a few fits and starts things look good now. On a nice note the ridiculously long JSS startup time seems to be fixed. Instead of taking potentially hours, its only a few minutes I'm being told.

On the MCX/Managed Preferences side, it looks like most of ours made it over successfully in the upgrade. We have a lot of MCX settings, so we need to poke through them all and compare against our 8.71 JSS, but we're even seeing some manual settings in there which is great.

Unfortunately, the issue above mentioned by @begood up above still remains. Create a new profile, save it, confirm its saved and there. Go back in to edit it and add something like Apple Scheduler and add the default Absolute Schedule item. Save and you are greeted by an error on the page. When you go back to Managed Preferences, the whole Profile is missing.
Still some serious bugs to be worked out. :/

[mvanvliet]

Anyone still seeing this in 9.2, we are still rocking 8.64 (thinking of going to 8.73), but if these type of issue remain for manual MCX preferences (Managed Preferences) we'll have to wait. Some really nice features in 9 but some very negative ones keeping us from moving to it.

[bjohnson]

9.2 Release Notes

Before you upgrade, consider the following:
If you are using smart groups—The JSS v9.0 and later no longer supports smart groups that contain
Note: The time it takes to upgrade from the Casper Suite v8.x or earlier has increased due to the number of changes and improvements in the JSS. The amount of time added depends on the number of mobile devices and computers in your inventory and the number of features utilized in the Casper Suite.

“Version” and “Title” criteria listed in that order. It is recommended that you switch the order to “Title” then “Version” before upgrading from v8.x to v9.0 or later. This applies to the ”Title” /“Version” criteria for applications, fonts, plug-ins, and mobile device apps.
For detailed instructions, see the following Knowledge Base article:
Switching the Order of Smart Group Criteria
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=335

If you are using Managed Preferences—There are two types of Managed Preferences that are lost 
Managed Preferences and Upgrading to v9.0 or Later
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=338