Thursday, May 1, 2008

Further down the rabbit hole...

So I got the OMSA service working on my 64-bit Debian server. THATS all fine and dandy.

Yesterday, I spent hours getting the nuances setup correctly to just get this thing to be "managed" by the central Dell OpenManage server, hopefully my hard work will help someone out there.

First, in terms of server monitoring, Dell has their "client" OpenManage Server Administrator(OMSA), and their "server" IT Assistant.

My IT Assistant is installed on windows and is pretty self-explanatory to get that part done, and I already explained how to install OMSA.

Now, in order for IT Assistant to manage an OMSA client, it must have SNMP read-only access to it, and in Linux, this is done through snmpd via SMUX and in Debian, SMUX is disabled by default(but isn't immediately obvious).

First of all, you need to enable SNMP read-only access to your server.

Then, you need to add a smux configuration for the dell OID. Add this to your recently-made snmpd.conf
# Allow Systems Management Data Engine SNMP to connect to snmpd using SMUX
smuxpeer .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1

As I said, by default Debian has SMUX turned off. You need to re-enable it by deleting the -I -smux in the startup options line in the /etc/default/snmpd file.

Now make sure you restart your snmpd service
/etc/init.d/snmpd restart

Your Debian SNMP configuration is complete. You can check the status of the dell data engine by:
/opt/dell/srvadmin/dataeng/bin/dataeng status

Now add a 'range' in IT Assistant with the IP of your server and community string you setup for your server. Then run a discovery job and it should appear in your devices list. The icon next to the device signifies if there are any current alerts applicable to this server.

Congratulations, you can now "manage" your server.

My current problem is that it appears that I cannot have IT Assistant generate alerts for my server since it can only do so if it receives a trap from the server. I find this pretty silly, it should support alerting me based on its polling, not just by waiting for an alert.

I defined a trapsink in my snmpd.conf, and the hardware log shows the event(me pulling out a hard drive), but no trap is received by the IT Assistant. My syslog shows the following:
May  1 14:05:41 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May 1 14:05:42 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May 1 14:05:43 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May 1 14:05:44 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14
May 1 14:05:45 inp2552zeus snmpd[5992]: Got trap from peer on fd 14

Anyone have any idea what the issue could be?

5 comments:

  1. Hello, I am trying to set up OMSA & IT Assistant to manage Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers. I have OMSA installed, but I am having two problems getting everything running - 1) I cannot change the root password for the login and 2) I can't seem to find/install IT Assistant.

    Have any tips for either of those problems? Does IT Assistant have to be installed on Windows or is there a way to do it on Debian? This post was super helpful - thanks for the info :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. To log into IT Assistant(or and OMSA managed node) you can simply use any user thats in the Administrators group. So if you want to change the login password, just change the users password within the OS. (passwd in linux or the manage users snap-in on windows)

    I do not know of a way to run IT Assistant on Debian...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello, I was just wondering if you ever got IT Assistant working with Debain. I have OMSA working but it sure would be nice if it would work with IT Assistant.

    Thanks,
    Todd

    ReplyDelete
  4. No, its been a long while since I messed with this, don't have any 64-bit debian servers at my disposal anymore to poke at it either...

    ReplyDelete
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