Configure or Repair Agents

[John Thompson_11]

Any help would be appreciated.

I am installing HP SIM 4.2 and am getting issues with the Agents. When you use Configrue or Repair Agents it is forcing out SNMP settings (eg. Community Names) but I do not know where it is getting this information. Can anyone advise?

[Rob Buxton]

First question would be why are you installing HPSIM 4.2? HPSIM 5.0 has been out for quite some time now. It's up to SP2.

I'm not sure that installing HPSIM would affect Agents.
The Repair Agents under HPSIM 5.0 will populate whatever settings you tell it using the screens provided. These include SNMP Community names. I'd guess it would pick up the initial values from whatever is configured under the Global Protocol Settings.

[John Thompson_11]

Thankss for your reply.

We had a 'consultant' advise us to install 4.2 but looking back on the SIM training he gave i am not sure if he really knew what he was on about!

Would you suggest just going straight to HPSIM 5.0, if so should we upgrade the 4.2 installation or go for a fresh install?

If we do go for 5.0 do we have to upgrade all the agents and sim software on all our proliant servers?

[Rob Buxton]

Answers in the text.

"We had a 'consultant' advise us to install 4.2 but looking back on the SIM training he gave i am not sure if he really knew what he was on about!"

If he advised 4.2 he didn't! I've had similar training where the level of expertise was well behind the product release.

Would you suggest just going straight to HPSIM 5.0, if so should we upgrade the 4.2 installation or go for a fresh install?

If you have no real investment in data or purpose built event handlers I'd go for a fresh install of HPSIM 5.0 SP2.

If we do go for 5.0 do we have to upgrade all the agents and sim software on all our proliant servers?

No, HPSIM is agent independent, but you will need to reimport Trust Certificates if you've used that as the Trust Mechanism.
I've still got some NT4 Servers with 6.40 of the Agents. As the agents get older some of the functionality goes.
Also with 7.20 (or 7.30?) the password mechanism for accessing the agents changed to use the Domain or similar account.

[David Claypool]

http://www.hp.com/go/hpsim --> Information Library --> 'Configure or Repair Agents' on page 8:

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Configure SNMP. Select this option to configure SNMP settings.

If this option is selected, the following steps must be considered:

1. Select Set read community string and to specify a community string. By default, HP Systems Insight Manager's first community string, that is non-public, appears in the field. If no community string exists in HP Systems Insight Manager, then you must enter one.

Note: If only HP-UX systems with default SNMP installation are being configured at this time, you may deselect this option. HP-UX allows read by default (get-community-name is set to public by default on HP-UX systems).

Note: If this option is selected, the Read Only community string is added to the target systems. If the target system is SuSE Linux or Microsoft Windows 2003, the managed nodes do not always allows SNMP communication between themselves and a remote host. This setting is modified to allow the instance of the HP Systems Insight Manager system to communicate SNMP with these target systems.

Note: You can enter a community string up to 255 characters.

Note: Repairing the SNMP settings adds a Read Write community string to the target system only if one does not currently exist. This community string is unique for each system, is composed of over thirty characters to include letters and numbers, and is only visible to the user with administrator privileges for that system. This Read Write community string is required by the Web Agent to perform certain threshold setting capabilities. This community string is only used locally on the target system and is not
used by HP Systems Insight Manager over the network. Linux and HP-UX systems do not need a Read Write community string, hence the Read Write community is added on Windows systems only.

2. Select Set traps to refer to this instance of HP Systems Insight Manager in the target systems' SNMP Trap Destination List. This allows the target systems to send SNMP traps to this instance of HP Systems Insight Manager.

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So, if there is not a Read Write community string present, it creates one as it says in the note above.

[John Thompson_11]

Rob,

Thanks for your reply, I think we will go for a fresh install of HP SIM 5.0 as we have no real configuration to migrate.

No doubt I will have more questions when we get 5 installed!

Cheers

John