Problems with Systems Management Homepage

[Aaron P. Perrault]

Morning,
We recently installed HP SIM, and i am having some problems. For some reason, I am unable to open the System Management Homepage on most of my servers. I have tried searching on this issue, and found a couple of people saying that we do not have read and read/write community strings. All of my servers have both read and read/create community strings (both the same) but i am still unable to logon to these systems. Does anyone have any thoughts as to what i can do to make these systems reachable again?

My boss is getting on my back to get this issue resolved.

Please assist ASAP.

Thanks

aaron

[Peter Havens]

Aaron,

I am not clear on what exactly you are having trouble with. You mentioned that you installed SIM but you can't "open" the SMH on most of your servers?

How are you trying to open SMH? Are you doing this through the SIM UI? Or are you going directly to the SMH from the location bar of your web browser?

What problem are you seeing when trying to "open" the SMH? No web response at all? 404 error?

You also mentioned that this is the case for "most" of your servers. Are there some servers where you are able to use the SMH?

This clarification will help others in assisting you with your issue.

Thank you,

-Peter Havens

[Aaron P. Perrault]

I guess the two things are probably not related, but they are becoming more noticeable now that HP SIM is installed. Let me elaborate a little more on the issue.

We have over 200 HP servers, almost all of them have the HP agents installed. For some reason, on about 90% of them, when you try and launch the Systems Management Home Page, i get timeout errors. I thought that the problem was the SNMP community settings, but changing that doesnt seem to do anything. I have changed the SNMP timeout settings, and nothing seems to help. I have uninstalled and reinstalled the agents, and I still have the same problem. The reason it is more noticeable is when you click on the server name in the SIM, it tries to open the Management Home Page. I get the same error if i try and access it from the server itself, or remotely through a browser. I am the domain admin for the machines. The only difference between the ones that it works on, and the ones that it doesnt, is the ones that it works on, are not memebers of the domain.

Thanks for the help, let me know if you need more info.

aaron

[Peter Havens]

Aaron,

Sounds like there is a problem with your installation of the PSP (Proliant Support Pack - this provides the SNMP agents and the SMH). How did you install this on the managed servers? Can you connect to one of the servers where you are experiencing the problem and try to reinstall the PSP and look for errors? Perhaps you are already doing this, but following the install guide for the PSP to the letter once might be worth a shot.

Here is a link to the web version of the SMH installation guide:

http://docs.hp.com/en/381372-004/index.html

Within that documentation you may find the following section useful in configuring the SMH. It has tips for setting up the SMH in different environments. If you are setting up the SMH for a Windows XP system there are some notes there on configuring security policies.

http://docs.hp.com/en/381372-004/ch10.html

-Peter

[mwalders]

Do you have any firewall policies on the domain machines? If the firewall is turned on you will need to open port 2381. You may also need to open 2301 but I believe that just redirects to 2381.

[Mervin Cinq-Mars]

I fixed this by adding both
http://servername and https://servername to the trusted zone in my browser.

I think http://servername:2301 and https://servername:2381 is more exact and should work, but I did the first one :)

[Peter Havens]

Good points,

Certainly if there is a firewall in the picture blocking access to some of your servers, this would create a problem. Allowing http and https traffic through ports 2301 and 2381 would resolve this.

As also noted adding the urls to your trusted zone could help. Could the issue also be as simple as DNS resolution of the servers in question? Have you tried connecting the SMH using the IP address of the servers rather than the domain name? Try the following address in your browser:

https://:2381

Let me know if you get things working.

Thanks,

-Peter

[Aaron P. Perrault]

I actually figured out what the problem was. It was all due to our group policies. We originally had a group policy that set the SNMP community string for all of our servers. the problem with setting the community string by GPO is it only creates a Read-Only community string. I know that HP-SIM requires read-Write strings, so i disabled that portion of the GPO. I was still seeing problems. I tried everything else that i could figure out and still was having problems. there was a second portion of the GPO that was still enabled. it was the portion that set the systems that were able to request SNMP data from the servers. Even though the IP address of the HP-SIM server was the one that was entered, it was not working, so i disabled the GPO completely, and manually set the accept to Any System, and now everything is working perfectly.

Thanks for the help everyone.

app

[Alan Ballew]

Ok, I am having the same problem with one particular server. I'm not very familiar with SIM and am fumbling my way around getting to know it. The installation CD seemed to bundle the server agents in with SIM itself, and I didn't need/want another instance - so I did an initial service pack install from the SIM console. I wasn't sure what settings to use for the home page and tried to replicate the settings from a working server.

Now, the SMH works fine from the local console, but SIM reports that it has no homepage and any attempt to access it by browser either by name or IP address, times out.