Comments on: Testing System Center Cross Plaform Extentions

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:30:14 +0000

Since most people land to this page from the Internet, I thought it made sense to warn them that my experiments with Xplat have continued, and that there is a serie of other posts on this blog about the topic:
http://www.muscetta.com/2008/11/23/centos-discovery-in-opsmgr2007-r2-beta/
http://www.muscetta.com/2009/03/27/cross-platform-in-opsmgr-2007-r2-release-candidate/
http://www.muscetta.com/2009/05/30/installing-the-opsmgr-2007-r2-scx-agent-on-ubuntu/

By: corwin

corwin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 07:51:27 +0000

Hi Daniele !
Thanks a lot !
I already wrote in connect newsgroups, thank you for advice. I would be explored further symptoms.

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:21:27 +0000

Hi Corwin, I have also seen high CPU usage in some cases on some of my test linux boxes, but it is not a constant or normal condition.
AS you have understood, that process is responsible for the WSMan implementation, so it is the process that is queries by the management server. I would suspect that in that case there is a monitor or a discovery that runs too often, so I would look there at first… but that's just my idea.
Also keep in mind that is a BETA software, so has not been optimized yet for production use… true, opsnwsman and openpegasus are existing components, but the CIM provider used underneath is now and under active development.
Nonetheless, I would suggest that you report this on the product newsgroups so you will make sure that the product team knows about this issue

By: corwin

corwin — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 06:06:51 +0000

Hi !
Thanks a lot for post !
After installing an agent with cross-platform MP for AIX 5.3
(version 1.0.2-104 agent). There is a high CPU loading process scxopenwsmand – from 75% to 85%. Who knows where to dig ? Thank you !

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:53:34 +0000

Jay, the self signed certs gets used automatically by OpsMgr and that should just work.
The step of trusting the certificate is only required for TESTING the WS-Man calls/queries using windows tools, such as WINRM, which would otherwise complain and refuse to connect.
Stuff not showing up as monitored only depends on a lot of patience on your side: all the discoveries run every 24 hours by default, so stuff will show unmonitored for a few days until all discoveries are finished. In a test environment you could set overrides to speed up the discoveries, tough.

By: Jay Scovill

Jay Scovill — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:41:54 +0000

Hi Eric,

With regards to this comment you made, "Of course you have to solve some other things such as DNS resolution AND trusting the self-issued certificates that the agent uses, first.", how did you go about accomplishing this?

I'm having an issue where the Hardware Availability and OS Availability rollups aren't being monitored or showing any info. same with the Performance node. I'm wondering if even though though there is no mention of having to do anything with regards to trusting the self-signed cert in the setup guide this is what is causing the problem.

Thanks

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Thu, 22 May 2008 06:12:51 +0000

Eric: I cannot show you the XML yet, but I gave plenty of hints up here already. You might also want to check out http://www.authormps.com to learn more about MP format and how they are written.

Paul: "sealed" means pretty much "digitally SIGNED. That means the actual content is not ENCRYPTED or anything: it is just SIGNED, so you know that it really came from Microsoft or [insert vendor here]… anyway, that it came from a source you trust and that it has not been tampered with.
In a way it is a security feature: imagine a Management Pack coming from someone you do NOT know and trust, that deploys a SCRIPT on all of your machines… now that would pretty much look like a worm to me. So MPs are sealed to prove their genuinity. And once they are sealed, the GUI recognizes it, and won't let you CHANGE anything in them, as that would of course break the signature. This does NOT mean they are encrypted. So you can still poke at them and see how the look like "from the inside".
There are a couple of techniques to get to the RAW xml. Boris blogged about one of those in the past, for example: http://blogs.msdn.com/boris_yanushpolsky/archive/2007/08/16/unsealing-a-management-pack.aspx

By: paul

paul — Wed, 21 May 2008 16:45:04 +0000

I got all this stuff working thx to your article. (I used real rh5)

You say that you exported one of MSFT managment packs. How? they are all 'sealed' and so cannot be exported. I want to experiment with tweaking their MP

By: Eric Levin

Eric Levin — Tue, 20 May 2008 17:40:27 +0000

I was able to unseal the Microsoft.Linux.RedHat.Library.mp and convert it to XML to use as a baseline or a starting point. Can you give a hint as to what you changed to make this work?

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Sat, 10 May 2008 06:34:21 +0000

No, you should not change stuff on the box or on any file.
You just have to change the discoveries in the MP.
It is written up here – look at the query for the SCX_OperatingSystemClass and what is it trying to find.

By: Craig

Craig — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:44:56 +0000

Thanks for the link. I was more curious as to where in the XML it actually 'discovers' the OS. I got a hacked MP to import that finds RHEL during the discovery by changing the redhat-release file. But after verifying it goes back to not being monitored. Apparently there is another string it is searching for somewhere else as well.

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Fri, 09 May 2008 05:29:59 +0000

Craig, I won't post my XML right now as it really is a hack at the moment – it will find CentOS instead than RedHat, but it won't find RedHat anymore!
I might post something later one – if and when I manage to make a complete NEW one that can work on CentOS, but that won't let you REPLACE the current RedHat one.
My goal is still using all Microsoft's sealed MPs on the Mgmt Group… I would like to ADD something, not *repleace* it.

In the meantime, if you want to fiddle with the XML of MPs, I highly suggest you to use the Authoring Console: it will be much easier to produce good, working MPs and understand existing ones. You can download it here http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6c8911c3-c495-4a03-96df-9731c37aa6d7&DisplayLang=en

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 08 May 2008 13:43:52 +0000

Could you post this xml? I am having trouble importing the XML mgmt pack after I changed a couple things:

'The service threw an unknown exception. See inner exception for details. The size necessary to buffer the XML content exceeded the buffer quota.'

After importing my hacked Management Pack…

By: Daniele Muscetta

Daniele Muscetta — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:07:39 +0000

Thanks Steve, I will check that out!

By: Steve Pyatt

Steve Pyatt — Wed, 07 May 2008 18:20:35 +0000

You can also use the cimcli command under the tools directory. The syntax would be;
cimcli xq "select * from SCX_UnixProcess" -n root/scx