WMI Windows Agents plugin

[Alex Earl]

Hi Everyone,

The WMI Windows Agents plugin uses a library called j-interop. This library was last released in 2010. Microsoft has made some changes to the DCOM protocol since this time. One particular change is highlighted in https://issues.jenkins.io/browse/JENKINS-67604, currently you can override this behavior in the registry, but in March of 2023, that will no longer be possible. This means that the WMI Windows Agent plugin may become unusable, unless someone who knows enough about DCOM internals can update j-interop with support for the new features (j-interop supports DCOM 5.4, the current version is 5.7 and has several additions/changes). With Windows Server 2019 and Windows 10, SSH is a viable option for Windows agents.

I would like to recommend deprecating the WMI Windows Agents plugin by March 2023. I think this gives enough time for people to migrate to either SSH or the Windows Cloud plugin (which uses a more modern remote management interface, WinRM). Basically this would mean the option to "Let Jenkins control this Windows agent as a Windows service" would no longer be available. 

Any thoughts on this? 

Regards,

Alex

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Website: http://earl-of-code.com