Technical Tip: Prerequisites to follow to allow FortiEDR Linux Collector update

To update the FortiEDR Collector on Linux endpoints, access to the official repositories is necessary for several reasons:

Dependency Management.

Package Dependencies: Linux systems often rely on package managers (such as 'apt' for Debian-based systems or 'yum' for Red Hat-based systems) to handle software installations and updates. These package managers use repositories to fetch the necessary packages and their dependencies. When updating the FortiEDR Collector, the system may need to download additional libraries or dependencies that are required for the new version to function correctly.

Security and Stability.

Security Patches: Repositories provide the latest security patches and updates for the software packages. Ensuring that the system is up-to-date with these patches is crucial for maintaining the security and stability of the endpoint.
Compatibility: Access to repositories ensures that the system can resolve any compatibility issues by fetching the latest compatible versions of required packages.

What to do in an Air-gapped environment:

It is understandable the difficulty in an air-gapped environment, since by nature these devices do not have Internet access; the FortiEDR collector assumes a functional package manager for the correct installation/update functionality.

In order to be able to update the collector on this system, temporarily enable the Internet access to the official repositories; this way, it will be possible to download the necessary libraries required by the new version, then the access can be removed.