Dell Server OMSA Reporting

I used to think that Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) was worthless. I was wrong. I apologize.

I've found for me it's the best way to do actual hardware monitoring. Although there are probably "Official Dell Best Practices" on using and implementing OMSA, I've just gone and installed it and then accessed the machine via my web browser (https://hostname:1311). However, today I found you can actually get some good stuff via the command line using "omreport". Dell's command line documentation for it is located at

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/svradmin/5.2/en/cli/html/report.htm#wp1068065

For instance, I can find out really quick what the status is of my hardware, except for disk/storage related hardware.

# /opt/dell/srvadmin/oma/bin/omreport chassis
Health

Main System Chassis

SEVERITY : COMPONENT
Ok : Fans
Ok : Intrusion
Ok : Memory
Ok : Power Supplies
Ok : Processors
Ok : Temperatures
Ok : Voltages
Ok : Hardware Log

Also, someone wrote a nagios plugin that executes this as well.

http://www.nagiosexchange.org/DELL_Server.61.0.html?&tx_netnagext_pi1%5Bp_view%5D=432

To check storage related, you can run the following command.

# /opt/dell/srvadmin/oma/bin/omreport storage pdisk controller=0
List of Physical Disks on Controller PERC 4e/Di (Embedded)

Controller PERC 4e/Di (Embedded)
ID : 0:0
Status : Ok
Name : Physical Disk 0:0
State : Online
Failure Predicted : No
Progress : Not Applicable
Type : SCSI
Capacity : 68.24 GB (73274490880 bytes)
Used RAID Disk Space : 68.24 GB (73274490880 bytes)
Available RAID Disk Space : 0.00 GB (0 bytes)
Hot Spare : No
Vendor ID : FUJITSU
Product ID : MAW3073NC
Revision : 5803
Serial No. : DAL3P6200PR8
Negotiated Speed : 320
Capable Speed : 320
Manufacture Day : Not Available
Manufacture Week : Not Available
Manufacture Year : Not Available
SAS Address : Not Available

ID : 0:1
Status : Ok
Name : Physical Disk 0:1
State : Online
Failure Predicted : No
Progress : Not Applicable
Type : SCSI
Capacity : 68.24 GB (73274490880 bytes)
Used RAID Disk Space : 68.24 GB (73274490880 bytes)
Available RAID Disk Space : 0.00 GB (0 bytes)
Hot Spare : No
Vendor ID : FUJITSU
Product ID : MAW3073NC
Revision : 5803
Serial No. : DAL3P6200PK3
Negotiated Speed : Not Available
Capable Speed : Not Available
Manufacture Day : Not Available
Manufacture Week : Not Available
Manufacture Year : Not Available
SAS Address : Not Available

My Controller ID is 0. This can be found by running "omreport storage controller". Storage commands can be found on

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/software/svradmin/5.2/en/cli/html/storage.htm#wp1082304

Clean cabling in the datacenter

Often, clean cabling in the datacenter is neglected; especially by yours truly. It's a hassle, it takes time, and usually you cut corners because you're trying to get other tasks done. However, I was sent this blog post that shows good cabling. I may have re-think about investing the time to do cabling right.

http://royal.pingdom.com/?p=240

RE: iPhone MAC address post

I ran into this post today from TUAW, and there is now an iPhone app that can switch your MAC address.

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/01/14/tuaw-responds-mac-addresses-on-the-iphone/

I guess that would make it more difficult to keep users from using the corporate wireless network with iPhones, unless you can implement a 802.1 solution.

What I've done at work is only allow wireless into our Guest VLAN. If they need to access corporate assets (printers, shared drives, etc.), then they need to use VPN after connecting to the
wireless network.

Couldn't Start Apache On Non-standard Ports

I was trying to configure Apache 2.x to listen on non-standard ports (ex. 8001) and was getting "permission denied ... unable to open logs" errors. This was on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 ES server that I had just built, and a fresh install of httpd using up2date. Strangely, if Apache was configured to listen on port 80, it would start with no problems.

Apparently, if you do not disable SELinux in your kickstart file, it is enabled by default. SELinux will not allow httpd to start on the high ports I was specifying. Since I currently do not use SELinux in my environment, I have no qualms disabling it. To disable it (RHEL4), I modified /etc/sysconfig/selinux and configured "SELINUX=disabled". This requires a reboot to take effect.

Setting up LVM in RHEL kickstart file

Another piece of fun today...

Task:
Set up and configure a linux box with the following partition information.

Non-LVM
/boot - 100MB

LVM
/ - 9GB
/opt - 12GB
/var - 8GB
swap - 8GB

Kickstart Entries:
clearpart --all
part /boot --fstype ext3 --size=100 --ondisk=sda
part pv.4 --size=0 --grow --ondisk=sda
volgroup VolGroup00 pv.4
logvol / --fstype ext3 --name=root --vgname=VolGroup00 --size=9216
logvol /opt --fstype ext3 --name=usr --vgname=VolGroup00 --size=12228
logvol /var --fstype ext3 --name=var --vgname=VolGroup00 --size=8192
logvol swap --fstype swap --name=swap --vgname=VolGroup00 --size=8192

My big mistake was trying to set the "pesize" in the volgroup line. Apparently, it will assume to use all if not set, which is what I wanted. RedHat documentation about kickstart options can be found here.

Creating ISO images with Mac OS X

Since moving .iso files is easier than CD's when performing remote installs, I was trying to find out how I could without paying for software. Apparently, you can do this natively with Mac OS X.

Giving credit where credit is due, I found this link very useful.

http://www.slashdotdash.net/articles/2006/08/14/create-iso-cd-dvd-image-with-mac-os-x-tiger-10-4

And then, if your kernel supports it, you can mount it like this.

# mount -o loop -t iso9660 file.iso

Cfengine File Permission Blunder

While testing some changes to our sshd_config, I imported a copy of it from another host to our cfengine repository. After making adjustments to our cfagent.conf so that the test machine would be the only host to get this copy, I saved the file and ran cfagent.

Much to my surprise, the test server's sshd_config file would not update. I double checked my cfagent.conf, made sure the file was correct in the cfengine repository, etc. Looking at /var/log/messages, I saw

Sep 4 12:52:50 testhost cfengine:testhost[4333]: Network access to cfserver:/repository/cfengine/test/etc/ssh/sshd_config denied

This was confusing, because the testhost:/var/cfengine/cfagent.conf was getting the new configuration file. After banging my head for a while, I realized that the permissions of cfserver:/repository/cfengine/test/etc/ssh/sshd_config were incorrect.

-r-------- 1 root root 3050 Sep 4 10:53 sshd_config

Apparently, when importing the file over to my repository, I kept its original permissions. After chown'ing the file to cfengine, everything worked. Unfortunately, "Network access denied" is misleading. So, in the future, check you file perms to make sure cfengine can read the file.