Installing the agent on Windows

The Next-Gen WAF agent is a small process that provides the interface between your web server and our analysis platform. An inbound web request is passed to the agent, the agent then decides whether the requests should be permitted to continue or whether we should take action.

Requirements

Version 4.50 and later of the Next-Gen WAF agent requires Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 or higher.

Prerequisites

Install and configure the Next-Gen WAF agent package

To install and configure the Next-Gen WAF agent on Windows, complete the following steps:

1. Create an empty agent configuration file at C:\Program Files\Signal Sciences\Agent\agent.conf.

   • If you need to specify a custom location for the agent.conf file, set the absolute file path with the system environment variable SIGSCI_CONFIG.
   • If you are deploying the agent in reverse proxy mode, check out the Reverse Proxy Mode configuration page for details on required configuration options.
2. Add the agent keys for your site to the agent configuration file.

   accesskeyid = "AGENTACCESSKEYHERE"
   secretaccesskey = "AGENTSECRETACCESSKEYHERE"

3. Download the latest Next-Gen WAF agent .msi from https://dl.signalsciences.net/?prefix=sigsci-agent/.

4. Run the .msi to install the Agent automatically with no prompts. It will install the executable in C:\Program Files\Signal Sciences\Agent, add a service entry for the Agent, and start the service if the agent configuration file is present with valid accesskeyid and secretaccesskey settings.

   The installed service name is sigsci-agent and can be controlled with PowerShell cmdlets:

   $ Start-Service sigsci-agent
   $ Restart-Service sigsci-agent
   $ Stop-Service sigsci-agent

   Alternatively, you can download the latest Next-Gen WAF agent for Windows as a .zip file, which contains the agent binary. You can run this from any location you prefer. However, to install the agent in this way, you will need to configure the Service entry and start the service manually.

Example services.msc screenshot:

Next steps

Explore our module options and install the Next-Gen WAF module.