Ah, another day ahem, night in the life of a systems admin. What was supposed to be a quick 10 minute change ends up taking 3 and half hours and running until 3AM in the morning. The change was to upload the patch 6 package for Mcafee 8.5i Virusscan into EPO 3.6. After importing the package, EPO stated the package was successfully installed. I then when and tried to do an update of the McAfee and was greeted by “could not find valid repository.” The logs stated it couldn’t download the sitestat.xml file. I looked at the repository and even though the package was for the entire 8.5i binaries with patch 6 integrated; the repository still showed the previous patch as current. I tried deleting the patch, but gave me access denied. A little more Google searching and it stated that sometimes, the repository sitestat.xml doesn’t get successfully upgraded when moving items from current to previous. So I decided to delete the current 8.5i package and then the previous patch. Now clients could connect to repository, but there wasn’t any VSE package to install. Back I went and uploaded the 8.5i with integrated patch 6 package; again, successful. I went to a client, and could still connect to the repository, but when I checked VSE’s version, it was still the previous patch. It wasn’t until I uploaded the actual patch 6 packagecatalog.z binaries, and ran an update from the client, did it actually change, to VSE patch 6.
It appears that while Mcafee integrated the patch 6 binaries into the VSE package, they did not update any version numbers. The client and EPO service does not know that it is a newer version. And they get confused and just quit playing well together.