HP SIM/SMH and Oracle Intelligent Agent on RHEL guide

[Tristan Zondag]

Hi,

I've come across the following situation: Proliant DL380G3/G4 servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3/4 and Oracle 9i with Oracle Intelligent Agent (OEM, DBSNMP) breaks all HP system management functionality: HP SMH, SIM integration, VCA etc.

The problem is that normally Oracle Intelligent Agent (dbsnmp) cannot run together with the OS native snmp daemon, and HP system management relies on working snmp functionality.

To solve this, Oracle has their own snmp encapsulator that acts as a snmp daemon and forwards requests and traps to the respective snmp daemons and managers. The native OS snmp daemon will be listening on different ports.

This guide describes how to configure HP SMH, snmpd, and dbsnmp to have both HP system management and dbsnmp working at the same time.

1. Identify which community strings are used by HPASM/HPSMH (grep COMMSTR /etc/hpasmrc)

2. Edit /etc/snmp/snmpd.conf to remove the IP ACL from all communities, for example:

rocommunity public 127.0.0.1

should read

rocommunity public

This is because the source IP will no longer be localhost. Tip: make sure there are no spaces or tabs after the community string :-)

3. Configure Oracle master_peer and encap_peer:
cd $ORACLE_HOME/network/snmp/peer
vi CONFIG.encap
make sure there is a section like this for every community string used (see step 1):

AGENT AT PORT 1161 WITH COMMUNITY public
SUBTREES 1.3.6.1.2.1.1,
1.3.6.1.2.1.2,
1.3.6.1.2.1.3,
1.3.6.1.2.1.4,
1.3.6.1.2.1.5,
1.3.6.1.2.1.6,
1.3.6.1.2.1.7,
1.3.6.1.2.1.25,
1.3.6.1.2.1.39,
1.3.6.1.2.1.2021,
1.3.6.1.2.1.8,
1.3.6.1.4.1.232,
1.3.6.1.4.1.11
FORWARD ALL TRAPS;

(I've added OIDs 1.3.6.1.4.1.232 (Compaq) and 1.3.6.1.4.1.11 (HP))

vi CONFIG.master
make sure there is a section like this for every community string used (see step 1):

COMMUNITY public
ALLOW ALL OPERATIONS
USE NO ENCRYPTION

and if you use SIM and traps:

MANAGER
SEND ALL TRAPS

4. Have a look at the Oracle start_peer script and verify snmpd and snmpd.conf location

$ORACLE_HOME/network/snmp/peer/start_peer

If using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, the following lines need be modified:

echo "Starting $SNMPD ..."
echo "$SNMPD -c $SNMPD_CONFIG -P $NEW_SNMPD_PORT >snmpd.out 2>&1 &"
$SNMPD -c $SNMPD_CONFIG -P $NEW_SNMPD_PORT >snmpd.out 2>&1 &

remove the -P since the syntax of snmpd in RHEL4 has changed. Optionally, add -s for syslog logging.

Oracle was not so kind to provide clean rc scripts or even a stop script.

5. Start everything:

$ORACLE_HOME/network/snmp/peer/start_peer -a
(Start_peer will start in correct order encap_peer, master_peer and snmpd. Needs to be run as root with ORACLE_HOME set!)
/etc/init.d/hpasm restart
/etc/init.d/hpsmhd restart

6. Verify SMH functionality and SIM integration

7. Make sure start_peer is called on system boot

8. Have an extended coffee break :-)

Sources:
Oracle Metalink doc ID 198018.1

I also found that tcpdump is very usefull for debugging snmp; that is what put me on the right track:
tcpdump -i lo udp

Good luck!