We have a problem preconfiguring the 7.30 agents

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Using the newest 7.30 agents from HP's website, we have run into this annoying problem:

When pre-configuring the agents, you must specify which windows-accounts/groups should be granted Administrator/Operator/User access, this is in theory fine, but does not work when deploying the agents.
To make an example, this is what we want to define:

Administrators = Administrator
Backup Operators = Operator
Server Operators = Operator

the configuration is saved in the exe-file, but when deploying to a server the result will look like this in the access list:

Administrators = Administrator
Backup = Operator

i.e. when encountering a group name containing a space the processing will stop at the space, configuring only half of the name, and then not processing the remanining items. We have tried reconfiguring and resaving, and get the same result every time on both Windows 2000 SP4, Windows 2003 and Windows 2003 SP1.

Is this a known problem and does anyone have any information if it will be fixed in some upcoming driverpack ? And is there a workaround for it today, as we are looking to deploying the new agents in august and having this issue fixed would be really great :)

[Brent Seizer]

It sounds like your using an older version of the System Management Homepage.

Uninstall SMH from Add/Remove first.
Then install the new SMH CP005171.exe
Do not install from the CD.
Run from disk. Make sure the file is not read-only. This will allow the program to prompt you for configuration information.

Brent

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Nope, clean install on a new system with same pre-configured agents will produce the same result for me.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Oh, and btw yes pre-configuring means running it from disk to be able to save the information, wouldn't be much point in trying to pre-configure the settings on a read-only media... ;-)

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Ok, I've spoken with our local HP support contact and he says this should not be a problem, but since he has been with me when we tried to pre-configure the agents and it did not work, we have agreed upon him bringing an at HP working set of pre-configured agents to us and we will test them out next week, then we should be able to see it this is caused by the agents or by something in the Windows setup.

[Mark Errington]

I encountered this problem as well - got around it by placing the account or group name in quotes i.e. "domain\SIM Agent Operators"

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Thank you, I do believe I tried this already, but I will retry it again and see it there is some change in behavior or if I may have made something wrong somewhere :)

[Mark Errington]

It worked for me but you must force a re-install of SMH for it the work.

I just noticed there is also new version of SMH that was released over the weekend.

[Haridas]

There is a new System Management Homepage 2.1.0.121 that supports group names with a space. It definitely supports power users.

You might want to check Backup operators or Server Operators.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/23065.html

Cheers,
Hari

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Thank you, however this one seems to have even more interesting side-íssues.

I used the setup.exe from the HP bundle to preconfigure the agent, and added Administrators as Administrator-role and then added "Backup Operators" and Server Operators as Operator-role, one with and one without "", just to see what happened.

When running the actual installation what did happen was that it added Administrators to the administrator-role as planned, then it added Server to the Operators role, and it completely left out Backup Operators.

Furthermore it also rearranged the order of trusts, not that I know if it affects anything, but I added the trusted names in the order cluster,node1,node2, and the order it was configured on the server was node2,node1,cluster.

It also ignored the setting that anonymous access should be turned off, but kept the other settings.

Now I don't know but this version seems even worse in using the specified pre-config than the previous one.

[Mikael Rönnbäck]

Aha, no I've got it, the new SMH agent works fine IF installing silently, then it will use all the settings I have configured for it, but if installing with GUI it will prompt for input suggesting the old/incorrect values. No idea where it gets those from, but since installation in silent mode works I'm happy again :)