Installing McAfee EPO on Windows Vista

March 27th, 2007 Posted in Windows Vista

McAfee EPOAt work we’re currently working on deployment and support plans for Windows Vista.  One of the biggest stumbling blocks we’ve had is installing McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator (EPO) on Vista.  It turns out that it is possible, but it’s not elegant by any means.  Vasken came up with the solution which you can read in entirety on his blog, but here are the quick and dirty instructions:

 NOTE: Only works for EPO 3.6 and Virus Scan 8.5i

  1. Disable User Account Control and reboot.
  2. Copy the EPO installation files (including framepkg.exe) to a local drive
  3. Right click on framepkg.exe (or a batch file calling framepkg with all of the necessary flags) and click “Run as Administrator”.  The installation will run in the background.
  4. When the install finishes, reenable User Account Control and reboot.
  5. Now that EPO is installed, use the EPO administrator console to push Virus Scan 8.5 to the computer.

As you can tell, this solution is not pretty but it is the only way we’ve found so far to do the install.  At the moment our helpdesk staff and restechs are doing these installs for our users.  Users with Vista are currently few and far between on our campus, but it’s certainly not a scalable solution as that user base grows.  If anyone has come across a better way of doing this, we’d love to hear it! 

UPDATE 4/13/07: I’ve come up with a solution for installing EPO without having to disable UAC.





  1. 7 Responses to “Installing McAfee EPO on Windows Vista”

  2. By MarquisEXB on Apr 9, 2007

    So how do you deploy EPO to a Vista PC remotely?

  3. By admin on Apr 9, 2007

    Marquis,
    It seems that the key to being able to install EPO on Vista remotely is to find a way to run the install script as the System account. The System account isn’t restricted by UAC, and thus you wouldn’t need to shut UAC off to be able to run it. How you do this is another matter … You can use the EPO console to do a remote installation, and you should be able to use Microsoft’s SMS or Symantec Ghost Solution Suite 2 to do the install. I have done the install through the console, but not through Ghost or SMS yet, but I’ll be updating this as soon as I have.

    Perhaps psexec from Sysinternals with the -s flag would be able to help you out as well. I am probably going to try to leverage psexec to package with the installer for our students to do the install themselves.

    I’ll keep you posted as we do more testing. I hope this helps!

  4. By MarquisEXB on Apr 13, 2007

    I’m able to install EPO through SMS, but it seems that you can’t deploy EPO using the Console to a Vista PC. At least out of the box…

  5. By admin on Apr 13, 2007

    I had the same problem at first with the console. Turns out, it was Vista’s firewall that was blocking the operation. If you open ports 8081 and 8082 for EPO communication and port 135 for WMI, it should work like a charm. We’re pushing those policies here to our users with group policy, so that we can remotely install epo on any computer joined to the domain. I hope this helps.

    I’ve also created an installer for EPO that does not require disabling and enabling UAC, just double click the .exe and you’re good to go. I’ll be putting up the procedure I used for that shortly if that’s anything you’re interested in.

  6. By nate on Aug 20, 2011

    This is exactly why I have a hard time trusting McAfee, at least it’s not MacAfee. It’s bad enough without the Scottish. I usually talk clients out of using software’s that mess with firewalls. But if you have to have one, you can pick up the microsoft security essentails antiviurs and the comodo firewall, both free at http://www.mynewitguys.com/downloads

  7. By nate on Nov 18, 2011

    also check out boulder computer repair for more information about the horendousness of McAfee

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