SSH from AXP to iLO port on IA64 to catch OPCOM

[Willem Grooters]

Current situation:
AXP, VMS 7.3-2, home-grown management system using Consoleworks. That will intercept OPCOM messages for whatever is needed - on behalf of the management system.

In comes an Itanium box with integrated LightsOut management unitr. It is said to be able to accept and serve SSH connections.
Conncecting to this iLO and issuing the CO command runs like an AXP console: the OPCOM messages (and severe system states) are shown.

The question now is how to connect the AXP system to the Itanium iLO using SSH (as-is on TCPIP 5.5), issue the CO command automaticly and have Consoleworks intercept these messages?

(I have no knowlegde of how Consoleworks intercepts these messages on AXP; whether it is intercepting a terminal channel or the console exit of OPCOM. Not whether it is able to intercept SSH traffic and handle that. It's just a customer question).

A more or less working solution is appreciated.

[Richard Whalen]

Through experimentation I've found that the following profile in the user's ssh2_config. works with the SSH offered by Process Software.

iLO:
SendKexGuess no
host hathorcon.process.com
user Admin
allowedauthentications keyboard-interactive,password
allowagentforwarding no
allowx11forwarding no

This may work for the SSH in TCP/IP services as the two implementations are very similar.

[Willem Grooters]

Thanks Richard.

But how to initiate a session on the Alpha size that does an automated CO command when connecting to th iLO unit? Because that waht seems to be the blocking issue.

[Sameer_Nirmal]

You can use "Expect" tool to automate the task once you have SSH setup/enabled for the iLO MP.
Take a look at the link which shows a sample Expect script using telnet. Modify it to use SSH.
http://docs.hp.com/en/5991-5983/ch06s04.html#expectse

[Willem Grooters]

Sameer,

This is the iLO side.
The problem is the SSH client on Alpha that needs to be automated. In some way, I need to start a process that starts an SSH session to the iLO, have it send the "CO" command and receive the console messages as long as it is running.

If the Expect tool works on Alpha, that would be a possibility, but I don't expect it to exist (if so, it would solve that part of the problem).