Identify Systems...

[Brian Whitcomb]

I am trying to determine what exactly this job does when it runs and am having no luck. I know that whatever it does, it tries to login as the local administrator and fails (I found how to fix this so that is not the issue).

Can you please help me with either a list of what it does or where to look to figure it out myself?

Thanks

[Joel Rubenstein]

Identify systems uses SNMP, HTTP and WBEM to determine the identity of the system, all protocols supported by that system, the web links the system supports, whether the system is part of a cluster and whether an iLO/RILO is installed. In other words, all the information displayed on the system pages for that device.

It is run on all devices once a day (daily device identification)

[Brian Whitcomb]

OK. I understand all that. Maybe I should have stated the question differently... What is it doing that requires it to attempt to log in as administrator? Every day when this runs, there are logon failed entries in the event viewer and I am trying to determine what this is trying to do that requires it to log in.

Does that make sense? Sorry for the confusion.

[Joel Rubenstein]

The identify systems tool should not need to login as administrator?

[Brian Whitcomb]

I agree it shouldn't, but everyday at 3:05pm I get these Logon Failure notices in the event log saying the "administrator" tried to login from the CMS.

Any thoughts?

[David Claypool]

This most likely is being caused by the SSH identification since it relies on a login.

[Brian Whitcomb]

Which leads me back to my orignal question... What is it doing that requires it to login to SSH if all it is using is SNMP, HTTP and WBEM to check on things?

[David Claypool]

SSH is used for the distributed task functionality. HP SIM needs to know if a system supports it or not so it knows if it can run a tool against a remote system.

[Brian Whitcomb]

What tool would it be trying to run? I'm tring to determine what is really going on in the background so I can fully understand what is needed. I don't want to go through the hastle of setting up the SSH user and password just to find it isn't really doing anything for me.

Make sense?

[Brian Whitcomb]

Everytime that the "Identify Systems" process is run, it tries (for whatever reason) to log in locally to the server as 'administrator'. The assumption was that this was through SSH and that if I went through the process on page 11 of the "Secure Shell (SSH) in HP Systems Insight Manager" document that it would fix this. It is still trying to log in as administrator.

Please help with this if you can.

Thanks.

[Jon Ward]

Just curiosly, do you have any user specified for WMI in the Global Protocl Settings?

[Brian Whitcomb]

By WMI I am assuming you mean the WBEM section of the Global Protocol Settings. I do have default setting here and it is administrator with a password, but I thought this was to access the WBEM page on the systems and shouldn't touch the OS. I'll try putting in a user and password here that matches up with a local account and see what happens.

[Brian Whitcomb]

Now I am really confused... I changed the WBEM account to one that I know will work if it tries to log in and sure enough, it worked. I verified that it did in the event log. So what in the world is it trying to do? Can someone please answer my question? I understand what the end result is, but why does it need to log in with the WBEM credentials on the OS?

[Jon Ward · Accepted solution]

Sorry for confusing the WBEM/WMI terminology...

In essence, hp Systems Insight Manager is WBEM/WMI ready. However, the hp Management Agents on Windows, Netware, and Linux platforms are not. Minimum if any information is obtained via this protocol on these platforms at this time. However, if the "Enable WBEM" protocol is enabled, it will try to use it. Likewise, it attempts to use the DMI protocol on these systems because it is enabled too, but the failed attempts do not leave the same trace.

To avoid this and reduce overall network overhead, it is possible to uncheck the "Enable WBEM" and "Enable DMI" options so that such communications are not attempted on Proliant Servers. If devices do indeed them, such as HP-UX, desktops, etc., it is possible to setup individual System Protocol Settings. A task can be setup to enable or disable protocols on a group of devices from Options -> Protocol Settings -> System Protocol Settings.

[Brian Whitcomb]

The lightbulb just went on. Thanks Jon. This explains a lot. So WBEM and WMI are the same thing? And I don't need to enable WBEM in SIM to get the information I need on my servers? Got it.

Thanks again.

[Jon Ward]

Refer to the WMI Mapper download description at http://h18004.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/21071.html for a description of the relationship between WMI and WBEM.

(I am not suggesting downloading this software, it may already be loaded.)