HP SIM CMS 5.3 with linux managed hosts problem

[Leibniz]

Hello:

I am having some problems configuring linux managed hosts and hope that some one can help.

Environment:
HP SIM CMS on Windows 2003 server
RHEL releases 3/4/5
SSH: Commercial, Tectia SSH

I have successfully discovered 3 RHEL 4 systems and they show up in the sever list, have been identified, and show all kinds of information. We are at this point only interested in monitoring, so what we have may be sufficient.

The problem is that even though I have successfully configured 3 RHEL 4 systems, there are a few other systems that are also RHEL 4, that I can not get configured.

Specifically, here's what happens:
- I exectute a discovery on the server
- CMS pings and finds the server, and starts it's queries. Many options disabled, so expecting non support for many queries. SNMP query/identification SUCCESSFULL.
The problem is with SSH. Here is the last three lines of the standard out from the discovery:

Running SSH Protocol identification.
The system supports SSH protocol
Running SSH Identification.


At that point, the page refreshes and the process still shows "Running", but it never completes. And since it never completes, the CMS treats the whole discovery process as failure, and does not put the server in the list of discovered servers. Thus, I am unable to run the Configure and Repair Agents tool on the server.

The version of Tectia SSH on the server is 4.4.12. And yes, one of the other RHEL servers which I have successfully configured has the identical version of SSH installed. Which is why this baffles me.

There does not seem to be any debugging tools on the CMS (at least not for/during this process) so I am left to assume that the SSH negotiation is having a problem at some point. The problem is that I don't know exactly what is failing.

If anyone can pinpoint this SSH exchange process with some detail as to give me a clue as to what to look for in the way of configuration (assumedly on the target linux system) please reply.

As a side note, how can I validate SSH connectivity (i.e. firewall problem) from the SIM CMS to the target system? Is there a CMD prompt from within the SIM CMS environment? I know that I can successfully SSH from the target linux system in question, to the CIM server. And since the SIM CMS reports that "The system supports SSH protocol", I assume that it can talk to the linux system on port 22. i.e. there should be no firewall issue. Which points me to the SSH exchange/identifcation process which appears to be never finishing.

The only other thing to note may be that along with ssh-4.4.12, we also have running ssh-mgmt-agent tool on the linux systems. I have compared (and copied configs, restarted, etc.) from the working to the non-working, and still no go.

This has been a problem for at least the last few weeks and we are having difficulty finding an HP SME to help us with the problem.

Thanks all for reading, and for any light you may be able to shed on this problem.

Bill

[Leibniz]

I hate replying to my own point, but just as a small point of clarification, when I say "linux managed hosts" what I really mean, of course, is "Linux managed systems".

[Leibniz]

No one here has any expertise with HP SIM CMS as it pertains to the SSH communication with linux managed systems?