Forticlient EMS Web Access Doesn't Work After Upgrade

[alvarotorales]

Hi,

I upgraded my Forticlient EMS to the 7.4.5 version and now i can't access to the web portal. When i try to run the command "service restart --all" in the linux console i have the next error:

get services status: start apache2 service: exit status 1
exit error: [exit status 1], exitStatus: 1

Can someone help me with this issue please?

[AEK]

Before upgrading did you make sure all required flows to internet are open?

Check the EMS Installation section here:

https://docs.fortinet.com/document/forticlient/7.4.5/ems-administration-guide/439480/required-servic...

Note that one repo is missing in the doc, I think it was grafana.com (you can check in your FW traffic log).

[SubjectName]

Yes. We verified it was able to go out to the internet. no blocks.

[FortiGuy85G]

I'm having the same problem. after you reverted the snapshot did you have any problems after upgrading to 7.4.5 again?

[Marioo]

I solve my problem deploying a new EMS VM v7.4.5 (moving the license to the new hardware ID) and restoring the backup from EMS version 7.4.4. It is working fine now.

[Marioo]

Hi,

I'm facing the same issue.

Did you find a solution for this?

[alvarotorales]

Hi, unfortunately I couldn't fix the error. I had to download the latest version of Proxmox and restore the database from my backup.

[BobDubbya]

Hello,

I've identified the issue and successfully installed the update after experiencing the same issue as you.

Our Environment background:

We've been using Forticlient EMS for a VERY long time and migrated from 7.2 running on a windows system to a linux system on 7.4.0. Back then there was no appliance and you had to spin up your own server, we used the current version of Ubuntu at the time, 22.04. We have since upgraded our EMS to the current versions and kept our server updated, including upgrading to Ubuntu 24.04.

There were two problems with our install:

• The python environment leveraged was not installed and linked correctly. Which caused Apache not to launch.
• The Grafana service did not respond before the installer timed out waiting for it.

I had to modify the installer to get the update to successfully install, here's the rundown.

Extract the installer files

1. Extract compressed tarball from .bin installer
2. Extract installer package from tarball
3. Extract contents of .deb

Modify deb install script and file content

1. Extract the contents of env24_amd64.tar.gz in opt/forticlientems/fcm to opt/forticlientems/fcm/env24_amd64
   -Our server is running 24.04, there's also a 22.04 version
   -This probably wasn't necessary, but I'm not going to go back and test, this was already too much work.
2. Modify DEBIAN/postinst script to fix the link needed. I just commented out lines 1078-1083, 1090-1093, and 1096-1099
   -I know our Ubuntu server is running 24.04, so I commented out all of the evaluations to determine what version of linux we were running
3. Modify DEBIAN/postinst to increase the timeout for Grafana, set max_attempts to 60 on line 581, modify sleep to 5 on line 590.
4. Rebuild .deb installer

Run the installer forticlientems_7.4.5.2111.M.sh

-the installer environment was extracted from the tarball, no need to reconstruct .bin file

Note:

- I've been using linux for over 20 years, these operations are not simple and I don't expect most EMS users to be able to do them, nor is it reasonable one should have to.
-This needs to be done with a working instance of 7.4.4, I don't suspect it would fix an already broken 7.4.5 upgrade.

-I opened a ticket with Fortinet for this, they looked at the installer logs and a backup of my database. While waiting on them, I continued my troubleshooting and provided them the solution that I had to complete above to get the upgrade to work. They responded that they were able to restore my database and upgrade from 7.4.4 to 7.4.5 in their lab without modifying the installer. I suspect their lab environment has not been upgraded from 7.4.0 to now and from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04. I asked for a gift card to burger king for my efforts and have not received it (I think this was a reasonable request).

Useful commands:

tail -n +683 *7.4.5*bin > ./bin/fems.tgz

deb-dpkg -r *deb deb

deb-dpkg -b deb forticlientems_7.4.5.2111.M_amd64.deb