IBM Director NEWBIE Questions

[mconzo]

I have been asking my mgr to look into IBM Director to help us manage our IBM servers for about 2 years. Long story short.. I have been assigned the task of rolling it out and have about 2 months to do so! Well .. I asked for it..

I have numerous questions and I appologize now if these have already been asked. I just printed all IBM Director threads and will read them tonight. My first impression is that this is a very valuable resoursce. I have found much of the IBM documentation to be somewhat lacking so far..

1) Is it necessary to have a host file / dns entries on either the mgmt server or the clients?

2) After installing IBM Director Agent 4.11 on a Windows 2k Server we need to bind the IP to the management adapter. We run twgipccf.exe and make the appropriate changes. However, all servers are showing a dial - up adapter each with a unique address 169.254.xxx.xxx. WHAT IS THIS? When I do an ipconfig this doesn't show up. Also NOT all of the adapters are showing up in the window. It seems that our Production adpater is always missing??? Also.. what is the “system name” field at the top of this window reserved for. It has a variable name %COMPUTERNAME% Should this be changed to the hostname of the director mgr or the client (agent)? After making these changes is it necessary to restart BOTH services... IBM Director Server Support and IBM Director Agent Web Server ??

3) Is there any way to configure the agent settings? How often does the agent advertise an existing alert to the Director Mgr? Can this be changed. Can pop-ups be disabled on the agents?

4) NIC is offline when NIC is not even in use. This is a JOKE. Is the only way to disable this alert by disabling the NIC in the BIOS?? That's horrible! If a NIC goes bad, we need to switch to a different NIC while the server is online, Can this be modified to monitor specific NICs only? Or can it be disabled on the agent side? Disabling the NIC in Windows does nothing for this..

5) What are ALL the ports that IBM Director uses to communicate with the agents and vice versa? Is the connection using TCP or UDP?

6) We have be running Agent 4.11 on 12 Win2k Server test machines with SP2 for over a year. There have been NO issues. IBM’s documentation states that SP3 or greater is required. Is this true? Or is it actually a recommendation and that some functionality simply will not be available?

7) What makes a machine unique on the Director Mgr ? Is it the IP address? Is it the hostname? Serial #? We build out our servers on a build network and then deploy to production. The director mgr is picking up these servers immediately after the install on the build net.. What happens when they go live with a different IP but same hostname? Will the mgr not pick them up because the IP that was originally used to register it with the Director Mgr is no longer in use? What happens when we build out more servers and use previously detected build network IP addresses by the mgr?

8) What is the recommended network timeout setting? I believe the default is 15 secs..

9) What is the process to setup a relay agent? I read another post that said this could resolve this issue.. We have MANY hosts that are going online and then offline and varied intervals… Event log show offline status for sometimes 5 minutes .. 15 minutes…sometimes 45 minutes or more! Is a relay agent used to offload some of the work from the Director Mgmt server? Does the IBM Director Server Software need to be installed on a relay agent ?

10) I can see in the Mgmt Server that several alerts are showing up. Some are critical ... some are warnings. However.. I did not configure any action plan to report these. I guess my question is what drives these alerts? Is it basically anything that the agents send out to the mgr ? I am referring to the bottom right hand corner.. red x with cirecle.. yellow background with exclamation.. I have chosen to IGNORE the numerous NIC offline alarms but this may not be the preferred method.. as we roll out about 300 machines with director ... these can get very annoying!

I know these are a lot.. Any assistance is greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advace,
Mike..

 

[catorze]

1. No.
2. Please clarify. IBM Director treats the RSA/RSA II separately from the managed Agent, since it is directly connected to the network, and independent of the Agent, the installed OS, and the host system for the most part. The dial-up adapter may be related to some remote access application you have that uses a virtual adapter. IBM Director detects the virtual adapter.
3. What are you trying to configure on the Agent? By default, the events flow. What you configure is the actions the Director server takes as a result of these triggers. Generally, the Agent sends the event to anyone listening on the management port when the event occurs, it doesn't linger at the Agent. Yes, popups can be disabled at the Agent. Use the web interface.
4. If you enable the interface (TWGIPCCF.EXE) on an unused NIC, who's wrong here? IBM Director monitors what is expected to be working. If you don't use the nic, disable it, or from the Management Console, choose to ignore the alert from the Hardware Status screen.
5. All IBM Director's ports are documented in the Installation & Planning Guide.
6. SP3 is a requirement for support. Just because you didn't see any failures doesn't mean everything is working. If a tree falls in the forest...
7. You will be okay if you deploy as described. If the Agents are not in the local subnet of the Management Server, you will need to configure Relay Agents.
8. Depends on your network configuration and utilization, but generally, 30-45 seconds should be plenty for most things. If you raise it too high, the Director server will spend a lot of time waiting for retries.
9. Take a look at the online help for configuring a Relay Agent. It tells you how and why.
10. You are looking at the Hardware Status I referenced in answer #4 above. The short answer is that Agents report everything and the Server logs it by default. Anything beyond that is through configuration of Event Action Plans. Read the product documentation!!! IBM Director is capable of many things, including shutting down production servers. Tread lightly.