OpenSSH and non-running jobs

[Rob Buxton]

Hi All,
Still battling this and I'm not having a particularly successful time with OpenSSH. The feature of HPSIM that is meant to replace the Application Launch feature, Custom Commands just doesn't work.

Problem:
A perl script that when run directly runs.
A Custom Command set up to run the perl script. This only runs if I create the task under the account I installed HPSIM under.

A Event Notification task to run the Custom command. This part has never run successfully. Again, I can only set this up under the account I installed HPSIM under. The Log file for the Task claims it has run, but the perl script never fires. I generate a generic SNMP trap, the task fires on receipt of a major event.

Trying to trace where it is failing is not proving easy.
I have tried adding my own User ID to the OpenSSH passwd file on the CMS. It has added it, but if I try and run jobs using it they still fail with an Authentication error.

I have tried without success to run the mxagentconfig utility. I just cannot logon to the CMS Server, even using the account and password that I installed HPSIM and OpenSSH under. All I get is failed to connect to server CMSServer.
According to the password file (passwd) there are two ID's in there, the account that I installed HPSIM under and mine, as I added earlier.
This has proved a tad frustrating, has anyone got it to work?
Did you install HPSIM / OpenSSH under the local account or a Domain Admin Account?

[Tim McGue]

Rob,

I hear your frustration. I did get it to work after about a day's worth of attempts. I couldn't tell you the last piece that got it to work because of all the different things I tried. Then I had to reinstall the application because of another failure and now it doesn't work. I'm frustrated too.

OK, so here are some ideas. One thing I did was to make sure OpenSSH itself was working. I used Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) to test it. One thing that kept getting me was if I should include a domain in the username or not. It turns out you do not supply it. Another HP site that gave some good advice was this: http://www.hp.com/wwsolutions/misc/hpsim-helpfiles/readme.txt

Go to the section that says "Mxagentconfig fails when trying to authorize a user on a Windows system,
that did not install OpenSSH."

Look at the event log for SSH errors too.

When your mxagentconfig fails, how does it fail? At one time I kept getting errors, but now it just hangs forever.

I believe when you setup your event notification you have to go back into it and set the owner of it to the account you want to use SSH with.

What a mess, I'm going to experiment with it more today and will let you know if I find anything else.

Tim

[Rob Buxton]

There's definately something either askew with SSH or my understanding.

Thanks for mentioning putty, I should have thought of that. But, I've not been able to login to the CMS Server using SSH.

At this point I'm not sure how case sensitive this is. Being that it's from the Unix world I probably need to be very precise.

[Rob Buxton]

Just some further testing with SSH. I've tried with both putty and the ssh client provided with OpenSSH.

Logins fail with:
Permission denied (publickey,password,keyboard-interactive).

This may just be indicating I cannot log in using a terminal session, but I don't know enough about SSH at this point.

I've tried this for both domain and the local admin account.
These accounts have been added to the OpenSSH passwd file.

Also tried changing teh loggin level to Verbose and restarting the OpenSSH Service, but that is still frustratingly blank.

[Rob Buxton]

Eureka - getting somewhere.
I downloaded and re-installed OpenSSH, I'm not sure if this is any different from the one included in th HPSIM set, it still shows up as 3.7.1p1, although the distro. seemed to indicate there was an additional -1 on the end.

Anyway, I can log in and now the Custom Commands are working. All down to a reinstall of OpenSSH

[Tekkie]

Rob,

when you finally fixed your Openssh problems you said you reinstalled it. Did you reinstall it on the CMS or on the managed systems?

[Rob Buxton]

Tekkie,
Depends on what you're trying to do.
I've reinstalled OpenSSH on the CMS in order to get Custom Commands to work. This is required as the Custom Command logs back into the Server using OpenSSH.
It really is quite sensitive to getting all of the details correct on the CMS first. Otherwise using OpenSSH to talk to remote Servers will not work either.
I had to add entries to the passwd file (via mkpasswd) and I also manually added entries to the groups file. Before I ran the mxagentconfig utility.