I have been working in IT since 2001 for companies such as Computacenter and Getronics. I started out as a first line support analyst supporting heterogeneous networks but rapidly worked my way up the ranks expanding my knowledge as I went to include areas such as system builds, deployments, networking, and security to name a few.In 2008 I decided to concentrate on the monitoring and management of large enterprise networks using Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager (OpsMgr) 2007 of which I have extensive knowledge. As testament to this the Windows Management User Group (WMUG), invited me to join their ranks as a Community Leader where I have been invaluable in helping to bolster the OpsMgr skills to the benefit of the group and it's members.I have now moved into an OpsMgr 2007 consultancy role to do what I like most - working with OpsMgr and sharing my knowledge and experiences with the community.
I’ve been once again deploying OpsMgr R2 agents onto Red Hat 5.1 servers and have found a prerequisite issue that some of you may experience. Within Appendix A of the Operations Manager 2007 R2 Operations Administrator’s Guide there is a listing of all package dependencies for supported UNIX and Linux platforms, however, this listing is not everything you need just what is most commonly needed. An example of this I discovered today.
The package dependencies for Red Hat 5.1 are listed in the admin guide as:
Required Package
Description
Minimum Version
glibc
C Standard Libraries
2.5-12
Openssl
OpenSSL Libraries; Secure Network Communications Protocol
0.9.8b-8.3.el5
PAM
Pluggable Authentication Modules
0.99.6.2-3.14.el5
So after checking that all these packages were installed I started an agent deployment expecting it all to be successful but to my surprise it failed. Unfortunately the agent install failure returned an error stating that the account had insufficient privileges to initiate agent, but as I was using the Root account I knew this wasn’t the case. I also expected there to be a different underlying issue as I had seen errors like this before as in a previous post http://wmug.co.uk/blogs/aquilaweb/archive/2009/07/21/opsmgr-r2-xplat-agent-deployment-field-notes.aspx.
I now had to take steps to find the problem so I tried installing the agent manually as per my own suggestion in the blog post above. But even doing this I didn’t get a direct reason for the agent failing to install, I just received the error /lsb/install_initd: No such file or directory. Unfortunately this did not mean a great deal to me but after some investigation I found that lsb is Linux Standard Base and is a requirement for agent deployment. Now I knew what the problem was, I installed the Linux Standard Base package with the command yum install redhat-lsb (Other tools and package names will be required for other operating systems). Once installed I attempted the agent deployment once more and presto, it all worked wonderfully.
I don’t believe that this issue will be overly common as the Linux Standard Base package is usually installed on most of the Linux distro’s but if you are working on a customized build as I was, this may well crop up.
For more information on Linux Standard Base, check out this link http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb.