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Installing Dell OpenManage Server Administrator on Ubuntu 32bit

Posted At : August 4, 2009 1:27 AM 4 Comments

I found this article on Installing Dell OpenManage Server Administrator on Ubuntu x64 on Keith's Code and am posting here with modifications for 32 bit for my own reference

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 32-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_si

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 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

If you get and error like:

Starting dsm_sa_datamgr32d: /opt/dell/srvadmin/dataeng/bin/dsm_sa_datamgr32d: error while loading shared libraries: libdcsmil32.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Starting dsm_sa_eventmgr32d: /opt/dell/srvadmin/dataeng/bin/dsm_sa_eventmgr32d: error while loading shared libraries: libdcsupt32.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

You may need to reconfigure the dynamic linker so that it knows the new libraries are.

sudo ldconfig

5. Start the web services

Start the Dell OMSA web interface:

sudo /etc/init.d/dsm_om_connsvc start

6. 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.

7. 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.

Thanks Keith for the helpful reference.

Cheers, Mark

Posted in: Systems admin, Ubuntu

Leave a Comment

4 Comments

reya276 8/19/09 6:56 PM

I followed all the instructions on your post but when I login to the Dell Open Manage site, I only see the system info, but no hardware information or memory info, or array info nothing. Is there anything else I need to do?

Mark Lynch 8/19/09 10:54 PM

Hi reya276,
Not sure really, on the server I have it installed on I get so see some info - but certainly not as much as when I was using it on windows servers. I have the following top level items on the tree, System and under that, Main System Chassis, Software, and Storage.

The only one with useful information is Main System Chassis, which tells me about installed memory, processors,temperature etc

Cheers,
Mark

Chris 10/12/09 11:54 AM

Thanks for this writeup - was very very usefull.

One change I made was to add the dell6 repository (deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell sara). This installed OMSA version 6 rather then 5. On Ubuntu 8.04 I had to manually install the libsmbios2 package from Karmic http://packages.ubuntu.com/karmic/i386/libsmbios2/...

With Version 6 I also didn't need a user in the root group - any user with sudo privelidge was sufficient.

Shows a good amount of detail on a PE2900: Bios versions, Memory slots, Fans, Temperatures, RAID cards, arrays and disks down to individual disk status and serial number. Also gave me notice that the driver for my PERC 6/i card is out of date.

Thanks for the writeup (and to Keith for the original and sara.nl for the packages)

Chris 10/12/09 11:56 AM

that was supposed to be (deb ftp://ftp.sara.nl/pub/sara-omsa dell6 sara) in my comment above.