Home arrow Tutorials arrow Installing Dell OpenManage Server Administrator on Ubuntu
Sunday, 01 August 2010

Login Form

Search

Subscribe

Subscribe to KeithsCode.com
 

Get Stuff

CafePress Store
 
Installing Dell OpenManage Server Administrator on Ubuntu

Dell's OpenManage Server Administrator is a powerful tool for keeping track of your server's health and making sure everything is running as it should. Unfortunately, Dell only released packages for RedHat and SuSE, so installing the software on Ubuntu can be tricky, at best.

There is some information on the Internet about getting the package to install on exotic distributions, but I never found anything definitive. This tutorial will guide you through installing the software and getting the web access up and running. 

My setup is: Dell 2950 with 1 Intel 2.2GHz Processor, 2GB RAM, PERC 5/i SCSI Raid Controller with 2 73GB 15K RPM SAS disks running Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS 64-bit.

1. Install the kernel modules

The first step is installing the needed kernel modules to support IPMI:

sudo modprobe ipmi_msghandler
sudo modprobe ipmi_devintf
sudo modprobe ipmi_s

Next,you will want to add those modules to the end of the /etc/modules file. This will allow them to be loaded at boot time.

2. Setup Apt to get the OMSA package

As stated before, Dell only released the OpenManage Server Administrator for RedHat and SuSE. However, someone was kind enough to create an installable Debian based package for us. In order to get access to that package, you will need to add the following line to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara

Then, you will need to install the Pulic Key for that repository. To do that, create a temporary directory in your home folder and run the following commands from that folder:
wget http://ftp.sara.nl/debian_sara.asc
sudo apt-key add debian_sara.asc

3. Install the needed packages

Now it's time to install all the packages that will be needed:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install snmp snmpd
sudo apt-get install openipmi
sudo apt-get install ipmitool
sudo apt-get install –f lib32ncurses5
sudo apt-get install –f ia32-libs
sudo apt-get install dellomsa

4. Start SNMP

The following commands will enable SNMP and get it going:

sudo /etc/init.d/snmpd restart
sudo /etc/init.d/dataeng start

5. Special Step for 64-bit users

If you are running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu, there are a couple extra things that need to be done to enable the login from the OpenManage web interface.

If you are running a 32-bit installation, continue to step 6.

i. Determine where your pam security files came from. The dpkg command with the -S option will tell you what package a file came from:
sudo dpkg -S /lib/security/pam_unix.so

On my system, this returned:
libpam-modules: /lib/security/pam_unix.so

ii. Download the 32-bit version of that package and extract it's contents

By googleing libpam-modules ubuntu, I was able to find a place to download the 32-bit (i386) package and copy the download URL. At the time of this writing, the correct url is: http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/p/pam/libpam-modules_0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6_i386.deb
sudo wget http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu/pool/main/p/pam/libpam-modules_0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6_i386.deb
sudo dpkg-deb -x libpam-modules_0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6_i386.deb

iii. Copy files to the lib32 directory

Next, you will need to copy a couple files from the package you just extracted to the /lib32/security directory:
sudo cp ./lib/security/pam_unix.so /lib32/security/
sudo cp ./lib/security/pam_nologin.so /lib32/security/

iv. Reconfigure the dynamic linker

Finally, reconfigure the dynamic linker so that it knows the new 32-bit libraries are there.
sudo ldconfig

6. Start the web services 

Start the Dell OMSA web interface:
sudo /etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc start

7. Add a user to access the OMSA site

If your system is setup properly, you shouldn't have a password for the root user. To access the OpenManage client, you need to have root access. There is a way to do this without giving the root user a password. I created a user called dellroot that will be able to access the OMSA client:
sudo useradd dellroot
sudo usermod -g root dellroot
sudo passwd dellroot

Enter a secure password for the user when prompted.

8. Check it out

Now you should be able to access the OpenManage web interface by going to https://<servername>:1311 (e.g., https://www.example.com:1311)

Make sure you are using https and you add the port number of 1311 to the end of the URL. You can login using the dellroot user you just created. 

If you are using firefox, you will have to add a security exception for the self-signed certificate the server is using.

If you have any feedback or questions, feel free to post a comment below or leave a note in the forum. 

Comments
Search
Simon Tobin   |2009-07-20 15:43:58
Great guide, helped me out a ton! I did run into a sort of issue, checking the
log:
"Rolemap file is missing: Assigning default permissions to the
user"

Any ideas? I seem to be getting full admin privileges, can't clear
logs, etc.
Keith Hatfield  - SE Linux?     |2009-07-23 14:09:07
It sounds like you're running the SE Linux security package based on that
log message. As I'm not completely familiar with SE Linux, I'm kind
of 'flying blind,' if you will.

It looks like you need to add a sys
admin role for the user with something like:
Code:
user dellroot roles { user_r sysadm_r };
make -C /etc/selinux load


Of course, if you aren't using SE Linux, then that's not your issue.


Beyond that, I've never seen that error message.

Let me know how
it turns out ...
Mark Lynch     |2009-08-04 00:13:56
Thanks for the info, very helpful.

I've just installed it on a 32 bit ubuntu
8.04 dell 2950 and noted the following differences:

The third module to load in
step one should be:
sudo modprobe ipmi_si NOT ipmi_s


I skipped the following
installs:
sudo apt-get install
Mark Lynch     |2009-08-04 00:40:37
Hi Keith,

My comments got chopped for some reason so I've posted a
slightly modified version on my blog for 32 bit environments.

http://www.learnosity.com/techblog/index.cfm/20...

Cheers,
Mark
Andy Hermes  - Apache setup with OMSA     |2010-04-23 19:25:03
I have a non-standard apache configuration. I am using xammp (formerly lampp)
on this server and the website root is not /var/www. Can someone post the
relavent httpd.conf section or other .conf file that OMSA needs to run so I can
adjust it for my settings? I've tried a few configurations, but no luck and I'm
not an apache expert.

Thank you. This site is just what I was looking
for!!

Edit 1:
Apparently, I didn't read the directions closely. I didn't do
step 6. It appears to be responding but I now get an error "SSL received a
record that exceeded the maximum permissible length."

any ideas?
Rob Donovan   |2010-06-07 18:41:07
Thanks for the how-to - much appreciated.

Installing on a brand new
Dell PowerEdge T110 running 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid) I found
that

Code:
 sudo /etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc start 


would return an * and nothing else. A subsequent

Code:
 sudo /etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc status 


would return with

dsm_om_connsvc32d is stopped

This turned out to be
due to missing libstdc++5 libraries. It seems that Lucid packages
have moved on to libstdc++6; Version 5 is not available in the Lucid
package manager.  However, you can still
download libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb from

http://packages.ubuntu.com/jaunty/i386/libstdc...

Then unpack it using

Code:
 dpkg-deb -x libstdc++5_3.3.6-17ubuntu1_i386.deb . 


Copy over the library directly to /usr/lib32/ and the daemon will then
start successfully.
Rob Donovan   |2010-06-07 18:30:08
To have the daemon run automatically at system startup use

Code:
 sudo update-rc.d dsm_om_connsvc defaults 


Also, as noted on Mark's learnosity page (see comment above) sara has now
ported OMSA version 6 to Debian. Change dell to dell6 in step 2 to
get it. You can keep track of sara's latest offerings here:

https://subtrac.rc.sara.nl/oss/omsa_2_deb
a w   |2010-06-29 10:40:18
first: thank you very much for the how-to... it was a great help

my question:

i'm running 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid)
and

Code:
sudo modprobe ipmi_s


throws

Code:
FATAL: Module ipmi_s not found.


so... now i can login into the OMSA-webinterface but there aren't any
systeminfos.. except the log.

any ideas?

greets!
Rob Donovan   |2010-07-21 20:07:22
The dell OMSA init.d files try to use /var/lock/subsys/ for lock files.
However, Ubuntu 10.04 uses a tmpfs (temporary filesystem)
for /var/lock so it gets wiped on every reboot. This generates errors
in the boot console messages and means OMSA isn't using its lock files. To
solve this I added

Code:

if [ ! -d $OS_SUBSYS_LOCK_DIR ]; then
mkdir $OS_SUBSYS_LOCK_DIR
fi


to /etc/init.d/dataeng just below the definition of
OS_SUBSYS_LOCK_DIR and

Code:

if [ ! -d /var/lock/subsys ]; then
mkdir /var/lock/subsys
fi


to /etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc just below SARA's hack.

The OMSA
code all seemed to be working fine before I did this, I was just
trying to clean up my boot messages. Note that S21openipmi requires
this directory too, so this fixes that error too.
You must be logged in to leave a comment.
No Account?
Join Now!
(It's Free.)

3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."