In this article, you will learn everything you need to know about the Infinity Management module. Infinity Management is a deployment tool offered by HEIMDAL Security that will provide you the ability to deploy 3rd Party Applications within your organization and to keep the deployed pieces of software up to date.
1. Description
2. How does Infinity Management work?
3. Patch & Asset Management - Infinity Management view
4. Patch & Asset Management - Infinity Management setup
DESCRIPTION
Infinity Management is a tool that can offer the possibility to silently deploy 3rd Party Applications that are not included in the list of 3rd Party Applications managed by HEIMDAL Security. Any applications that fulfill the requirements needed by the 3rd Party Software product can be deployed using the HEIMDAL Agent.
HOW DOES INFINITY MANAGEMENT WORK?
Infinity Management is based on the 3rd Party Software module and works only if the 3rd Party Software module is turned ON. When the Patch & Asset Management - 3rd Party Software module is enabled, the HEIMDAL Agent checks the installed applications to see what are the 3rd Party Applications installed on the endpoint(s) and reports their status in the HEIMDAL Dashboard. Currently, Infinity Management supports the deployment of 3rd Party Software that can be installed through apt.
Infinity Management can be used to:
A. Automatically install a 3rd Party Application that is not managed by HEIMDAL Security;
B. Automatically update a 3rd Party Application that is already added in the Infinity Management module;
INFINITY MANAGEMENT view
On the top, you see a statistic regarding the number of Apps included, and the Occupied size out of a total of 1,000 TB.
Below the statistics, you see a search field that allows you to search between the configured applications, the Add New App button and the Distribution filter that allows you to filter the applications by Distribution.
INFINITY MANAGEMENT setup
To add a 3rd Party Application to Infinity Management you need to fill in the following fields:
- Application Name - the name of the application;
- Publisher - the name of the Publisher of the application;
- Distribution - select a Linux distribution (Ubuntu is currently the ONLY supported distribution);
- Custom Expressions (the custom expression must match the application's name or package). This field tells the HEIMDAL Agent what's the name of the application and how to identify it when it is installed on the endpoint. You can specify multiple custom expressions to match an application by its name and you can also exclude the name of an application that might have a similar name. Use the Custom Expressions Helper for more examples;
- Repositories - allows you to specify the locations from which the system retrieves updates and installs the applications. Multiple repositories can be added through the Add Repository button. For each repository added, users will need to select the corresponding Distribution and mark with the checkmark Is Default the default repository to be used;
On the HEIMDAL Agent side, only the repositories configured for the installed version of Linux Ubuntu and the ones marked as being default are added. For example, if an application has 3 defined repositories, one for Ubuntu 16.04, one for Ubuntu 18.04, and one for Ubuntu 20.04 that also has Is Default enabled, and the HEIMDAL Agent is installed on an Ubuntu 18.04 version, the repositories for 18.04 are added because it matches the OS version and for 20.04 because this version is marked as Is Default; - GPG URL - allows you to specify the URL for the public key of the repository where the application is downloaded from (in case this is a private repository that is not known to Ubuntu/Debian);
- GPG Thumbprint - allows you to specify the public key fingerprint used to identify the public key of the repository public key (in case this is a private repository that is not known to Ubuntu/Debian);
- Packages - name of the packages that are used by the application;
- Before Install - allows you to run a script before installing the 3rd Party Application:
- After Install - allows you to run a script after installing the 3rd Party Application:
After configuring all the required fields, press the Save button. Once you save a patch, you can always come back and disable it by pressing the Disable button.
Since the 3rd Party Applications that are deployed on Ubuntu/Debian endpoints update themselves automatically through the repositories, once an application is configured, there's no need to make any other changes/updates to the setup of the application (the way you would do for the 3rd Party Applications that are deployed on Windows endpoints).