Dell OpenManage Server Administrator

I decided to have a go at installing the Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA) on some Dell PowerEdge servers with Debian. Since commercial organization feel that RedHat or SuSE are the only Linux distros that should be officially supported, I went out on the hunt for Debian packages.

In the past, I've tried a simple conversion of the RedHat RPMs using alien, but that fails due to the fact that the scripts are too RedHat specific (or should I say non-standard Linux specific). At any rate, I would shortly give up afterwards because I didn't feel like messing around with it in depth. This time I did a little searching and to my excitement, someone had done all the dirty work for the conversion from .RPM to .DEB!

After some additional work and searching, I was able to get everything installed and working, and here's how I did it.

Instead of telling a big elaborate story about how I installed everything, I'll try to keep things more concise to be more of a HOWTO guide.

I found some user created Debian packages for OMSA 5.1 on the Dell web site.

http://linux.dell.com/files/openmanage-contributions/debian/omsa5.1/

Download the three Debian packages: dellomsa_5.1.0-2_i386.deb, libopenipmi0_2.0.2-2_i386.deb, openipmi_2.0.2-2_i386.deb

Install the Debian pages using dpkg

dpkg -i dellomsa_5.1.0-2_i386.deb libopenipmi0_2.0.2-2_i386.deb openipmi_2.0.2-2_i386.deb

In order to avoid the error "Error! cannot load data accessor:", you must also have the libstdc++5 package installed, so...

apt-get install libstdc++5

After you install this package, make sure you restart the daemons.

/etc/init.d/dataeng restart
/etc/init.d/dsm_sa_ipmi restart

NOTE: When I try to run the dsm_sa_ipmi daemon, it gives a red asterisk (*) after the startup text. It doesn't appear that the daemon runs properly (for me anyway), but the OMSA queries still seem to work.

By default, the OMSA will not run its SNMP process, so if you want it to hook into an existing snmpd daemon, you need to enable it and restart the daemon.

/etc/init.d/dataeng enablesnmp
/etc/init.d/dataeng restart

This will allow you to query data through SNMP. In order to allow the OSMA and snmpd to "link up", I need to enable it as a smux peer. To do this, I had to modify two files (first to enable smux, then to allow the OSMA to pass the data):

/etc/default/snmpd
Remove the -I -smux from the SNMPDOPTS line to enable smux. My final line looks like this:

SNMPDOPTS='-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -p /var/run/snmpd.pid'

/etc/snmp/snmpd.conf
Add the following line to allow the smux peer:

smuxpeer .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1

After you restart the snmpd daemon, you should be able to query it to retrieve the information from the OSMA (make sure you replace COMMUNITY and HOSTNAME appropriately).

snmpwalk -v 1 -c COMMUNITY HOSTNAME .1.3.6.1.4.1.674.10892.1