I have recently stood up a half-dozen virtual servers in a new home lab I am building to compliment my home office.  This means I want to get the Tanium Client installed onto these endpoints.  Rather than do it manually, I’m choosing to use the Tanium Client Deployment Tool and install them remotely from my windows workstation.  At the time of this writing v5.0.0.6 was the latest and has a few essential features required for installing the agent onto my new non-windows systems.

Installing the Tool

Installation of the Client Deployment Tool is relatively straightforward.  Launch the installer and click “Install”.  Assuming the default installation directory is acceptable.

Initial Tool Setup

Once you launch the tool there are a few things that need to happen.  The first is the tool itself will prompt you to download the very latest agents for the various OS platform Tanium supports.  Allow that to happen…

Next we will need to point the tool at our server infrastructure in two ways… First by pointing the utility at our tanium.pub file.  This file can be found in the Tanium Server root folder on the server.  Second we’ll need to specify the hostname or IP address of the server we will be pointing endpoints at.  This second value could be the hostname or IP address of a zone server or even an alias that functions differently inside and outside your network.  Lastly if you chose to use a port number other than the default 17472, you’ll need to specify that now.

Install the Agent

For this article we will deploy the Tanium Agent to one of my new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS virtual servers.  My user account on that box has sudo permissions and that is required in order to install new software.

Next we will specify a single endpoint to deploy too.  To do that we change the lower-left tabs to “Computer List” and type in the hostname of the targeted endpoint.  Then change the very bottom left dropdown to “Linux_Mac_Only” to avoid unnecessary timeouts by trying a windows connection and hit the “Analyze” button.

If all works well our tool will report back “Client not installed”.  Select that row and click “Install”. 

All done… The client deployment was successful.  To validate, we can simply log into the Tanium Console and check Administration->System Status to see our new endpoint listed and reporting in.

In Conclusion

The Client Deployment Tool is a great utility for getting the Tanium Agent installed on your endpoints fast.