Agentless / Network Monitoring with Hyperic

So… I’ve installed Hyperic and am using it to monitor a bunch of stuff (Disk Space, RAM, CPU, Services) on boxes that I have installed the Hyperic Agent on but I really want to just do a simple ping against a bunch of network devices for network monitoring…. Looking at the UI it is not at all obvious how I would accomplish such a task. The answer is you have to run the job against an agent, and here’s how you do that:

1. Install a Hyperic Agent that is going to do the actual pings for you. In my case I just installed it on my Hyperic Server. NOTE: You must install the agent as root

2. Browse to that “Platform”, i.e. the sever you installed the agent on.

3. In the little “Tools Menu” dropdown select “New Platform Service”

4. In the next window give this monitor a name and select the Service Type of “InetAddress Ping”:

5. The next screen is going to display a little banner that says “The resource has not been configured”. Click on the “Configuration Properties” hyperlink.

6. On this last step provide the FQDN or IP of the device that you want your agent to ping.

There you go, you are now ready to monitor your network connectivity using Hyperic. One last piece of advice; you might want to change the test interval to a smaller number than the default. You can do that from Administration > Monitoring Defaults > InetAddress Ping (click on the Edit Metric Template on the right side).

Bad ESX Network Driver on BL490c G6

Ok, so here is the scenario: HP Blade (BL490c G6) has a bad stick of RAM, pull blade from cabinet, swap RAM, re-insert blade, power on blade and receive the following ESX error:

"networking-drivers ...
No compatible network adapter found. Please consult the product's Hardware Compatibility Guide (HCG) for a list of supported adapters."

At first we were sure that the issue was firmware related however it appears that it just might be a bad VMware driver. Here's why: I went ahead and did two test cases to isolate the issue to the VMware driver on our BL490c G6 blades.

Blade 1: Updated to newest Firmware from HP Smart Update Firmware. This updated the NIC Bootcode from 5.0.11 to 5.2.7 but left the iSCSI at 3.1.5. After this the machine will boot most of the time after the blade is removed from the chassis, however after several reboots there are seemingly random times when ESX will not load the NIC and you get the "No compatible network adapter found" error when attempting to boot ESX. After installing the new drivers found at "http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/drivercd/esx40-net-bnx2x_400.1.48.107-1.0.4.html" using the esxupdate command it works fine. I have rebooted many times and removed the blade and am no longer able to get the error.

Blade 2: I left the firmware alone and just updated the VMware driver to the latest from the above URL. After several reboots and physically removing the blade from the cabinet twice I am unable to get the error.

Conclusion: Looks like a VMware driver issue; however updating the HP Firmware on the NIC from 5.0.11 to 5.2.7 does seem to help the issue taking it from happening every time to approximatly %50 of the time.

W32/Wecorl.a McAfee False Positive Workaround

If you are running McAfee Antivirus on Windows XP SP3 and have an issue with your computer rebooting with a message of "Windows must now restart because the DCOM Service Process Launcher service terminated unexpectedly" and W32/Wecorl.a is reported on your machine in the Application Event Log then it is caused by a known issue with DAT 5958. To abort the automated shutdown open a command prompt and type in "shutdown -a" and then get yesterday's (5957) superDAT from McAfee at http://www.mcafee.com/apps/downloads/security_updates/superdat.asp?region=us&segment=enterprise and run the file from the command prompt with a /F switch to force the downgrade and reboot when prompted. That will work until McAfee fixes the issue.

*QUICK UPDATE*
After doing the above steps you may not be able to connect to the network and also will notice that many of your services that are set to automatic will not start. This is because your svchost.exe file was eaten by McAfee. Copying SVCHOST.exe from another good XP SP3 machine to your broken one's c:\windows\system32\ directory fixes that issue.