The fight to install HP Mgmt Agents and System Management Homepage

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 2 comments

Published on March 24th 2011 - Listed in Hardware Linux Rant

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One thing at the beginning: HP is always good for a surprise! Back in 2008, when I had to deal with a lot of HP server, I got to know the Insight Agents and the System Management Homepage. Something necessary to have a good hardware monitoring (Nagios plugin check_hpasm highly recommended!) and to get immediate hardware information. 

Back then, the installation was pretty simple, almost as duh! simple as the installation of openmanage on a Dell server. First install the hpasm (included the Insight Agents) package, after this it was the turn to install hpsmh (System Management Homepage). Easy, fast, successful. This was then.

Now it is 2011 and why should HP keep it simple when it can also be done more difficult? On my search for new hpasm and hpsmh packages I found nothing. After a lot of time, I eventually (and by accident as this is normal on HP's website) found this document, which informs, that hpasm doesn't exist anymore and was split into three different packages: hp-health + hp-snmp-agents +hp-smh-templates

So let's start over again. First hp-health is asked/required. You won't find a download called like this because this package is actually called HP System Health Application and Command Line Utilities. Next come the SNMP Agents, followed by the hp-smh-templates package (HP System Management Homepage Templates). I installed ALL packages, one after another on my SLES11 server and finally I could login to the System Management Homepage on port 2381. But no server data was shown. FAIL.

(Working method:)
And now let's start over again (again). On my search I also found this HP discussion topic, where one of the user recommends the installation of PSP (Proliant Support pack). So I downloaded the PSP for SLES11, unzipped/untarred it and ran the installation:

./hpsum

An X11 display is required and as the server ran on init 3, I forwarded the display to a VNC server. The text was scrambled and appeared only as squares but this didn't bug me as the installation could also be launched as following:

./hpsum /express_install

After this installation and a reboot of the server, System Management Homepage finally contains and shows the correct data of the server. Success!

Now what is the difference? A lot! A lot more rpms have been installed by PSP than what was written in the found document. Another HP document (Managing Proliant servers with Linux) I have found also says to install the OpenIPMI Driver (hp-OpenIPMI) but this isn't the only thing PSP added:

# rpm -qa | grep hp
hp-fc-enablement-1.1-17
hpvca-6.2.0-8
hpacucli-8.60-8.0
hpsmh-6.2.0-12
hpdiags-8.6.0-18
hp-OpenIPMI-8.5.0-1.sles11
hp-snmp-agents-8.6.0.18-20
hponcfg-3.1.0-0
hp-smh-templates-8.6.0.14-16
hp-health-8.6.0.24-32

Summary: To not lose too much time with searching through (almost hidden) documents and different versions of installation instructions and software packages, just take the Proliant Support Pack, install it, reboot (or launch the init scripts) and you're fine.

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Comments (newest first)

Peter from UK wrote on Jan 21st, 2012:

...thanks for the write up, it\\\'s a very useful option to diagnose/fix HP driver, snmp agent and system management homepage issues.

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Emilio J from wrote on Nov 4th, 2011:

That's the right way, man. ProLiant Support Pack always do it easier and saves a lot of time.

Thanks!

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