Adding Red Hat Linux 5 client to SCOM 2012

This was a painful, painful journey with a number of obscure errors that turned out to be canards. The first thing to know about adding a Linux client is that your chances of a successful install, straight from the management console are not high. Each and every time on simple test environments, the agent failed during my tests. I could not have made the Linux install more plain than I did. So, start from that perspective. I have embeded a short video of the process I went through. My suggested steps are as follows:

• For your Linux/Unix distro, copy the appropriate rpm package over to your system as step one. I used WinSCP to accomplish this task.



• Go ahead and install the package and then reboot your system



• Check DNS for both forward and reverse records of your Linux/Unix system. If those don't match, you will get certificate errors and start off on a wild goose chase that has nothing to do with certificates.



• Ensure the hostname (hit a terminal window and simply type: hostname) is the same as the records you have in dns.



• Make sure the reverse record has the fully qualified domain name and not just the host name. When my system first came online, it registerd just the host name, and then the FQDN. With both records in DNS, it really confused SCOM.



• Once these points are completed, the agent should install with a high degree of success probability.



• During installation, I would highly recommend adding hosts individually and search for them via FQDN, not IP address. It wasn't until I did this that the error messages pointed me to the correct problem.



• If you do have to make DNS adjustment, ensure you run ipconfig /flushdns on your SCOM server. I also fought with this. Eventhough records were correct, the server still saw the old entries.

• Updated, Oct. 30, 2013 - Had a number of problems adding several old Linux servers recently. Received the errors shown in yellow in this post. The local host name on the Linux server had a different domain address than we thought it did. Adding the server with the old domain name was successful. Alternatively, we could have updated that information locally, but was not an option for us at the time.

If your DNS records are not correct, you may get errors such as these. Check DNS first before checking certificates. There are a lot of examples out there that will lead you farther from the solution if you don't check DNS first.

DNS resolution