Uninstall

This chapter explains how to uninstall Rudder.

Of course, uninstalling the agent means that the related server won’t be configured anymore by Rudder even if the node is still registered in Rudder server.

Uninstall Rudder agent on a node

Agent package

Uninstalling Rudder agent on node is done through OS package manager. Usually, these commands need root rights. Commands are presented below for each supported OS family.

Once rudder-agent is uninstalled, you should check that:

  • rudder related services are correctly stopped. Check with the ps aux | grep rudder command that none are still running or kill them.

  • rudder static and generated files were correctly deleted (especially for cron and init services)

For the second point, you can ensure that everything is deleted by removing these two directories:

rm -rf /opt/rudder
rm -rf /var/rudder

You may want to also delete rudder-agent logs:

rm -rf /var/log/rudder

Uninstall command by OS family

On CentOS or RHEL (all supported versions):

yum remove rudder-agent

On Debian or Ubuntu (all supported versions):

apt-get remove rudder-agent

On SLES (all supported versions):

zypper remove rudder-agent

On AIX (all supported version):

rpm -e rudder-agent

On Slackware:

slackpkg remove rudder-agent

On AIX, you will need to edit main crontab to remove rudder related commands by hand:

  • edit /var/spool/cron/crontabs/root

  • remove line(s) about rudder. There should be only one, looking like:

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /opt/rudder/bin/rudder agent check -q >> /var/log/rudder/agent-check/check.log 2>&1

Backup files

Uninstalling rudder-agent package will let backup files of node identifying files (UUID, node keys, etc) which allows to reinstall package and have Rudder server still know that it’s the same node than the one previously registered.

If you want to definitely uninstall that node, you need to delete these backup files

rm -rf /var/backups/rudder

This action is definitive and once done, you will need to reinstall and re-accept node as a new node in Rudder system.

Removing node in server

Even if rudder-agent package is uninstalled from a node, the corresponding node is still active in Rudder system: policies are still generated for it, etc. Of course, the node won’t send compliance reports anymore and so it will appear as a non answering node.

To delete a node from Rudder, you need to go to the node details page and click on the Delete button.

Uninstalling Rudder relay servers

You can uninstall the Rudder packages with your package manager, and follow the same cleanup steps as for the agent.

We recommend to keep a backup a relay configuration files for future reference.

Uninstalling Rudder root server

Uninstalling the Rudder server package will remove configuration data, that will be lost if you don’t have a backup.

In the general case, we advise to not uninstall Rudder server packages and to prefer to use a solution depending on your business and technical constraints where the underlying virtual machine is stopped, backupped, and hibernated.

In any case, you should keep a backup of the server for future reference, and make a backup of server data before processing.

You can uninstall the Rudder packages with your package manager, and follow the same cleanup steps as for the agent.


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