It’s time to Install Sentinel One. In this blog, we are going to go through the process of installing Sentinel One through Intune. We are going to be using the IntuneWinAppUtil program, and the MSI download of Sentinel one that you can obtain from your Sentinel one login portal. I will not go over how to download the msi installer.
File/Folder Structure
The next item you will need is the Microsoft Win32 Content Prep Tool [Link]. Once you have downloaded this file, I suggest creating a file structure as follows
Intune
Files
IntuneWin
After that, Extract the intunewinapputil.exe file to the top level of your file structure, intune. Place the MSI inside the Files location. Then we should be ready to run intunewinapputil.exe. Before you do, I always suggest reading the help by using the /? command line prompt. Here is the command we are going to use to convert our file.
Intune Win App Util
.\IntuneWinAppUtil.exe -c c:\Intune\Files -s SentinelOneInstaller.msi - o c:\Intune\IntuneWin
Afterward, we use the command above to convert our file into a intune installer file. This will give us a large amount of control. Things like detection rules, custom msi inputs and more. Which we will be using.
Intune – Setting up the installer
Next, It’s time to crack open the intune process. Log in to https://endpoint.microsoft.com/ with an account with intune rights.
Once you have logged into the endpoint management system. Click the Apps on the left-hand side of the screen.
Since we are deploying sentinel one to windows machines, under by platform, click the windows icon.
Uploading the Installer
Now we are going to click the add button on the right-hand side of the screen. This will bring up the add dialog box. We are deploying out the final option. Click the Windows App (Win32) option.
Setting the rules
Here we can change the name. Add a unique, html, description. Update the publisher, the application version and more. The category we are going to select is computer management. They show this as a featured app in the company portal. You want to check that one. This allows people to download this version of perch. If you want to feel in any of the other information you are welcome to. Once you have the required information, click next to go to the Program page. Where we determine how to install this application.
Adding the Key
On this page, we want to show the install and uninstall commands. This is where research comes into play. If you don’t know the silent install command of your program then that’s a problem. If you don’t know how your program responds to installs and the error codes or success codes it produces. that’s also a problem. You will need to know these things for other applications. Sentinel One is unique as it’s commands is a little different. Here is the install command:
Keep the uninstall command the same. As the MSI installer of Sentinel One is the app code. The biggest problem with the uninstall command with S1 is that it doesn’t work without prior approval. You have to log into the S1 Portal and approve its uninstall. Keep the default and continue.
Another thing to point out, this kicked my tail, the SITE_TOKEN does not have a /, I repeat NO /.
On this page, we can scan the system to make sure we meet the requirements. So if you know this is a heavy application, you can say to have at least 8GB of ram. You can even have PowerShell scripts that can trigger. A good example would be a user. If user Bob is on this PC don’t install it. The required items are the OS Arch and the minimum os. Which is going to be windows 10 1607 as that is intune’s min. Don’t get this confused with the next item. These are the requirements. Not meeting the requirements will prevent the app from installing. Once you have added what you want, click next.
On this page, we are going to select any dependencies that the application may need. Something unique about Sentinel One is, it will capture all of your custom PowerShell deployments. It’s best to set those as dependencies on this installer. This way they will deploy before S1 does. S1, doesn’t need any additional dependencies from my current knowledge and testing.
Detection Rules
We are going to use a Powershell Script to validate the install. Click on the Rule Format and select Use Custom Detection script. Upload your script file using the blue folder icon.
This script checks for the Sentinel Agent every 30 seconds after installation. Then it increases my timer, by 30. It finally stops at 300 seconds. If services are null, it just exits, and thus a failure is seen in intune. If it is installed, it exits with a string. This tells the system that the installation was successful. What I like about this part is, that if the edit needs to be done, it can be done at this point using PowerShell.
The next screen supersedence is where you can choose what will replace the application. This is a preview feature at the moment and the idea is for upgrades. The final section is the Assignment, this is where you will select a group of devices for S1 to deploy out to.
I hope this is helpful for everyone viewing this page.
Perch is an event log tracker that can catch a lot of useful information. I like perch because it captures failed login information. It’s easy to sort and exportable. This is why many companies use the software. There are some gatchya’s with perch installs though. If you are installing it on a server, some services don’t auto start. Installing it from PowerShell also has a gatchya. This post is about how to install perch via PowerShell scripts. This method uses your token for the client’s site. Let’s Install Perch with PowerShell.
Let’s break down the script. The first thing we do is create the download repo. I personally like to use the C:\Temp. Not all machines have a c:\. This is why I use the variable $Env:SystemDrive. If the OS drive is d, the code will add a D:\Temp. and so on and so forth.
The next line is the URL for the latest and greatest Perch installer. This keeps your download up to date. With that stated, this also means if they change something you will need to be able to catch that change. So you will need to stay up to date with their deployment. A good way to do that is by registering with their updates emails. I like to have a ticket every 3 to 6 months, randomly placed, to review deployments like this one. This is just a good habit.
Now we have the url, we want to create a path. Using the Env:SystemDrive we place the perch-log-shipper-latest.exe into the temp folder, our local repo. This will make the next command easier.
Now we invoke-webrequest this bad boy. Just like curl and wget, we are able to download the file. Using the PerchURL in the URI position and then the outfile will be the perchfullfilename. Of course, we use the basic parsing just in case it’s an older version of PowerShell. At the time of this writing, the default PowerShell is 5.1 on windows 10.
Now we start the installation. We start-process. Using the PerchFullFileName as the target. See, using parameters helps. Our argument list is /qn for quiet. The output is going to be the token. Finally our token value, value is our token from perch’s site.
Getting the token
To get the token, you will need to log into your perch system. At the top, select the company you wish to get the token from.
Next, you will need to click on the settings icon on the bottom left-hand corner. Then click the Network icon.
Normally we want to add a -wait flag to the end of the installer. Things like google chrome do great with the -wait flag. However, in this case, we don’t want to do that. The reason we create advanced checks is due to the multiple sub-processes inside of the perch install process. The wait flag only captures the first process.
Confirming Install Perch with Powershell
With all that, it’s time to confirm the installation. The most simple way to do this is by watching the services. Perch installs 2 services. It installs perch-auditbeat and perch-winlogbeat. During the confirmation process, we wait. If a timeout occurs, we get the error. If the application installs, we get the results. At this point, we want to start our time-out timer. That’s why we have a $timeout = 0. We then start a do until. Each time the system loops, we wait for 5 seconds. Then we add 5 to the timer. This effectively creates a timer for us. This process is repeated until the conditions are met. The services with the name perch* are greater than or equal to 2, or the time-out reaches 500.
If the services are installed or if the timeout is reached, we moved to the next step. By default, the auditbeat is set to manual. So we check to see if we have the two services. If we do, we then set the perch-auditbeat to automatic and start the service. If not, we throw an error saying the services did not install. This will alert the deployment engineer to dig deeper into this machine. From my experience, it’s because another application is installed.
My last weekly challenge to myself was to deploy google chrome with Powershell. This one was the hardest because it was hard to find the latest and greatest MSI 64 bit of google chrome. The coding wasn’t too hard after that. How google chrome works, follows suit the same way as firefox did.
We first start off getting the latest enterprise edition of google chrome. This is the 64-bit version thus the most stable version on them all. This is the version I would install everywhere in a company if I had a choice.
That’s it. Very simple very straightforward. If you need to uninstall before installing (My testing was a success with overlapping the installers) then you can do the following before Installing google chrome:
Need to deploy the latest version of firefox to 1000 machines, Here is a little powerhouse script that can do just that. It’s similar to my last script (Gimp) as it downloads directly from the web. This time we don’t have to parse out a website since Modzilla has it laid out before us.
The source is awesome. We are downloading directly from the site with their latest 64-bit product. This time we are going with the temporary file and then downloading the file with invoke-webrequest. Then we start the process of installing it with the /s flag which means silent. Since we are coming from the temp folder I threw in the runas flag to run it as the system. This way it installs for all users. Next, we set the wait flag to install the system. From everything I have read, we don’t need to uninstall the previous version to install the newest version. We do however have to stop the process that’s why we have a get process and stop process above. Finally, we remove the installer. That’s it. A lot simpler than Gimp.
The first thing we do is set up the path we want to make. Then we test to see if the path exists. If they don’t, we make them. I’m using temp in this cause because I will be deploying this to 2000+ machines. We will remove the installer afterward. I want the Temp folder to existing afterward for future deployments.
Next, we grab the URL we want to work with This is the gimp’s official download portal. This portal is by default Oldest to newest when you pull from it using Powershell.
Then we use the Invoke-webrequest to grab the website as we did in a previous post. From there we grab all of the links. In this case, since it’s a repo, they are all download links except for 2. We only want the exes of the list, so we use a where-object to find those. Then we select the last 1 as it is the newest version.
Now we need to build our URL and our Path. This is some string controls. Notice the $($Something.Something) in this code. When you deal with an array in a string and want to grab a sub item, you need to call it out with the $().
Now we want to uninstall the pervious version of Gimp. Since gimp doesn’t show up in the win32_products, we go to it manually in the file system. Newer gimps host themselves inside the program files > gimp 2. So we search to see if that folder exists with a test-path. If it does, we then check to see if gimp is running. Then kill it with fire… ok, not fire, but force. Gimp is awesome about putting an uninstaller inside the file system. So we will use that. It’s located in the Gimp 2 > Uninst > Unins000.exe. Which can be triggered with a /verysilent parameter to keep it quiet. We do this with a start process and we use a flag -wait to wait on it to uninstall.
Then we start the install of the new gimp with the start-process again. We use the Download Name we made eailer with an argument list of /verysilent /norestart /allusers and a -wait.
hello and welcome to The Random Admin. This blog was born out of a love for teaching and learning new things. Over the years, I have learned the best way to learn something deeper, is to teach it. This blogs main focuses are, Information Technology and Mental health. If you find it helpful, let me know. As always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out.