Dell OpenManage Server Administrator is the software app that comes with most Dell Poweredge servers. It exposes various hardware sensors and stuff to a central management app (Dell IT Assistant) and (probably) SNMP. Dell provides RPM’s for Red Hat and SuSE, and a package for Windows.
This is all well and good, but if you’re like me you run eschew RHEL for CentOS. While they’re more or less the same, the installer for OpenManage can tell the difference, and if you run it, it will just terminate with no output. This was a simple problem to solve.
When the installer runs, it greps through /etc/redhat-release to find the version name of the OS. To get it to install on CentOS, just stick the Red Hat OS name in the file, then delete it when you’re done.
CentOS 4 — add the word nahant to the beginning of the file
CentOS 5 — add the word tikanga to the beginning of the file
You’ll also need to have these packages installed (this list works on CentOS 5 x86_64 — adjust for your own version of the OS or CPU architecture):
#yum install gcc cpp links lynx iproute iptraf tcpdump vim-enhanced sysstat libgcc.i386 ncurses.i386 openssl096b.i386 pam.i386 zlib.i386 libxml2.i386 compat-libstdc++-33.i386 compat-libstdc++-296.i386 compat-libstdc++-33.x86_64 OpenIPMI.x86_64
Edit: For CentOS 4 32 bit, use these packages:
#yum install gcc cpp links lynx iproute iptraf tcpdump vim-enhanced sysstat libgcc ncurses openssl096b pam zlib libxml2 OpenIPMI compat-libstdc++-3
After the Dell installer runs and the services start, you can access OMSA by going to https://servername.or.ip:1311 in your browser and logging in as the root user. It uses PAM to authenticate — so far I have seen that loading the pam.i386 package from the repo will break authentication for VMWare Server on the box. Beware!
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