Monitoring Fedora Core 4 with SCOM 2007 R2 – Part 1

Fedora bases upon Red Hat Enterprise linux which is supported by SCOM. Fedora Core 3 was the base of  RHEL 4 and Fedora Core 6 RHEL 5. In this blog posts I will try to convince SCOM that the Fedora 4 based Asterisk telecom system is a RHEL 4.

First we have to install the RHEL4 scom agent manual onto the systems. In this case we had to install the OpenSSL library, too. Additional we add the scom user account to the system.

After that we sign the local created certificate by the scom server and replace it on the Fedora system.

Now we can test the connection from the SCOM server with this winrm command:

winrm enumerate http://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/SCX_OperatingSystem?__cimnamespace=root/scx -username:scomuser -password:yourpassword -r:https://your.fedora.system:1270/wsman -auth:basic -encoding:UTF-8

The output shows detail information about the OS:

SCX_OperatingSystem

CSCreationClassName = SCX_ComputerSystem

CSName = your.fedora.system

Caption = Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz)

CreationClassName = SCX_OperatingSystem

CurrentTimeZone = 120

Description = Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz)

Distributed = null

ElementName = null

EnabledDefault = 2

EnabledState = 5

FreePhysicalMemory = 1399808

FreeSpaceInPagingFiles = 2039808

FreeVirtualMemory = 3439616

HealthState = null

InstallDate = null

MaxNumberOfProcesses = 32216

MaxProcessMemorySize = 0

MaxProcessesPerUser = 999

Name = Red Hat Distribution

[…]

Interesting for the monitoring are three settings: the caption, the description and the name.

If you want to know how the Red Hat Management pack discovers his systems you have to look into the signed management pack (MP). The authoring console only shows some information of a signed MP. If you want so see all information or want to copy some discovery routines you have to unsign it.

This is a very simple task with the SCOM powershell:

get-managementpack -Name “Microsoft.Linux.RedHat.Library” | export-managementpack -path “c:\export”

This one-liner retrieves the Microsoft.Linux.RedHat.Library MP and saves it unsigned to c:\export. You have to do it with the Microsoft.Linux.RedHat.Library and the Microsoft.Linux.RHEL.4 management pack.

If you look into the discovery routines with the authoring console you see that the discovery takes place in three steps. The Red Hat Library discovers all Red Hat systems by the operating system name. In this case the name of the Fedora OS is equal to the search name of the Red hat library: “Red Hat Distribution”. For the discovered systems an object of the type “Microsoft.Linux.RedHat.Computer” is created.

The  Microsoft.Linux.RHEL.4 MP checks all this objects for a  RHEL 4 distinguished caption value to create a “Microsoft.Linux.RHEL.4.Computer” object. So if you want to convince SCOM that a Fedora 4 is a RHEL 4 you have to create a MP that  creates a RHEL4 object based on the Fedora Stentz caption.