CentOS 4.x and OMSA 6.1 - Update breaks IPMI --FIXED

[Mike Hanby]

Anyone know why Dell refuses to support CentOS? Or at the very least acknowledge that a LOT of Dell hardware out in the field is running it and don't prevent OpenManage from installing / starting on CentOS? Just display the warning that it's unsupported and then proceed to start the software.

From: linux-poweredge-bounces at lists.us.dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-bounces at lists.us.dell.com] On Behalf Of Hostmaster
Sent: Friday, July 03, 2009 8:41 AM
To: linux-poweredge at lists.us.dell.com
Subject: CentOS 4.x and OMSA 6.1 - Update breaks IPMI --FIXED

Hi All,
I have a CentOS 4.7 server which automatically downloaded and installed OMSA 6.1 last night after it was released onto the repo. I noticed this morning that it had broken all SNMP hardware checks, and on investigation this was caused by the fact that IPMI was not running.

A “srvadmin-services.sh start” came back with:

Starting Systems Management Device Drivers:
Starting dell_rbu: Already started                         [  OK  ]
Starting ipmi driver: Unsupported version                  [FAILED]
Starting Systems Management Device Drivers:
Starting dell_rbu: Already started                         [  OK  ]
Starting ipmi driver: Unsupported version                  [FAILED]
Starting DSM SA Shared Services:                           [  OK  ]

“Unsupported version”? Hmm.... It worked OK yesterday with 5.5! I started pulling things apart and found that it was failing when starting IPMI in /etc/rc.d/init.d/instsvcdrv. A manual run of that script provided:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/instsvcdrv start
instsvcdrv_oihapicfg_validate_addheader()
Starting Systems Management Device Drivers:
Starting dell_rbu: Already started                         [  OK  ]
Starting ipmi driver: CheckOpenIPMIVersion: FAILED to determine OS
CheckOpenIPMIVersion: kernel version minimum is: 2.6.15
CheckOpenIPMIVersion: running kernel version is: 2.6.9-78.0.5.ELsmp
CheckOpenIPMIVersion: failed: kernel patch version < minimum
instsvcdrv_oihapicfg_validate_addheader()
Unsupported version                                        [FAILED]

Aha! The script is failing to determine which OS the server is running, and then using the kernel requirement of 2.6.15 as a fallback/failsafe. CentOS 4.7 is still on 2.6.9, hence the “Unsupported Version”.  RHEL4 is however a “supported OS” for OMSA6.1, so what is going on here? Obviously the script is failing to pick up on the fact that it is Centos 4.7.

vi /etc/rc.d/init.d/instsvcdrv

    365         ##elif [ ! "`grep 'Nahant' /etc/redhat-release 2>/dev/null`" == "" ];
    366         then
    367                 debugprint "${l_fname}: OS is RHEL4"
    368                 l_maj_ckey=${OPENIPMI_RHEL4_VERMAJ_CONFIG_KEY}
    369                 l_maj_dflt=${OPENIPMI_RHEL4_VERMAJ_DEFAULT}
    370                 l_min_ckey=${OPENIPMI_RHEL4_VERMIN_CONFIG_KEY}
    371                 l_min_dflt=${OPENIPMI_RHEL4_VERMIN_DEFAULT}
    372                 l_modext=".ko"

But my /etc/redhat-release doesn’t contain “Nahant”....

cat /etc/redha-release
CentOS release 4.7 (Final)

A quick amendment of line 365:

365        elif [ ! "`grep 'CentOS release 4.' /etc/redhat-release 2>/dev/null`" == "" ];

And it works:

srvadmin-services.sh start
Starting Systems Management Device Drivers:
Starting dell_rbu:                                         [  OK  ]
Starting ipmi driver: CheckOpenIPMIVersion: OS is RHEL4
CheckOpenIPMIVersion: minimum version is 33.13
CheckOpenIPMIVersion: version >= minimum
instsvcdrv_oihapicfg_validate_addheader()
Already started                                            [  OK  ]
Starting Systems Management Data Engine:
Starting dsm_sa_datamgr32d:                                [  OK  ]
Starting dsm_sa_eventmgr32d:                               [  OK  ]
Starting dsm_sa_snmp32d:                                   [  OK  ]
Starting DSM SA Shared Services:                           [  OK  ]

I hope someone else finds this useful, or that the nice folks at Dell can please put a clause into this script to identify Centos 4 using this string and classify it as RHEL4 equivalent. FWIW, I have tested OMSA 6.1 on some CentOS 5.3 servers, and they all seem unaffected.
Best Regards,
Richard Garner (A+, N+, AMBCS, MOS-O)


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