Customizing Asset Management › Virtual Hosts › AIX › IBM Hardware Management Console (HMC) Configuration Script › Linux and UNIX Agent Configuration

Linux and UNIX Agent Configuration

The UAMhmcConfig script will set up the necessary requirements for the inventory process to remotely access the HMC. An Asset Management user account (uamuser) will be created on the HMC and the agent uses this account to collect the inventory information. The script will also create SSH keys to enable remote command access to the HMC without password prompting.

The UAMhmcConfig script that can be found in the default installation directory (usually /opt/CA/DSM/Agent/AM/scripts), must be run under the root user account before the asset management agent is to be run. The script only needs to be run once in a single agent machine with the AM remote agent installed to enable HMC access for the agent. However, running the UAMhmcConfig script in more than one agent machine ensures that the overall server inventory is still likely to be produced, even if the agent machine in which the script has been run suddenly becomes unavailable.

If the UAMhmcConfig script is not run before the asset management agent is invoked, the agent will not be able to report on the overall server inventory, such as total resource usage and free resources available on the server.

Once the script is started, you are asked for the following information:

• The host name of the HMC that is used to manage the server.
• The name and password of an existing user account on the HMC, which can be used to create the uamuser account. This existing account must at least have the role of "User Administrator".
• The password for the uamuser account that will be created.

The script checks if the uamuser account already exists on the HMC and only creates it if required. During this check, a message might appear that states that the authenticity of the HMC cannot be established and asks you if you want to continue connecting. This usually means that the host name of the HMC you entered does not have an entry in the $HOME/.ssh/known_hosts file. Answering yes to this question automatically updates the known_hosts file, so you will not see this message in the future.

Once the uamuser account is available, the asset management agent public/private key pair is created. The key files reside in $HOME/.ssh and are named uamkey and uamkey.pub for the private and public keys respectively. To enable the asset management agent to run remote commands under the uamuser account, on the HMC, the public key needs to be placed in the uamuser authorized_keys2 file. The UAMhmcConfig script picks the uamuser authorized_keys2 file, places the asset management agent public key in the file and copies the authorized_keys2 file back again. During this procedure, you are prompted for the uamuser password, which you entered during the account creation phase.

Note: When configuring the virtual host inventory collect task, at the Add Virtual Hosts step enter “$ROOT_HOME/.ssh/uamkey” in the SSH key location field for the IBM HMC.