Monitoring Fedora Core 4 with SCOM 2007 R2 – Part 1

earthFedora 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.

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3 Responses to Monitoring Fedora Core 4 with SCOM 2007 R2 – Part 1

  1. Peter De Keukelaere says:

    Do you have an idea, where SCX_OperatingSystem gets the name “Red Hat Distribution”?
    Does it check a specified file?

  2. markus says:

    @Peter De Keukelaere
    Hi,
    I’m not sure if I understand you right.
    You meen the display name of the OS object in SCOM?
    Als you can see in the second post it is derived from the target linux system itself:

    $MPElement[Name=”System!System.Entity”]/DisplayName$
    $Data///*[local-name()=”Caption”]$

    And on the linux system it is received from the pegasus CIM Model. You can find the string hard coded in http://scx.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/32074#794912.

    So if you want your own string you can change the agent or take the easy way and hardcode the value into the management pack

    I hope it helps

    Markus

  3. Peter De Keukelaere says:

    Hi,
    that’s indeed what I meant.
    I think I’ll go the management pack way. For me the easy way.
    I’m having problems with the Ubuntu agent and management pack from codeplex.
    As there is no 64bit version of the agent, I had to convert it myself.

    Thanks for the info.

    Peter

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