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OME reporting from Mac clients?
I see that OME can query using SSH for Linux systems, and since that's the foundation of the Mac OS, I thought I could use that to get info from our Mac client machines. However, I haven't had any success with this so far. Has anyone tried this and had success? Any tricks involved?
Thanks!
DELL-Rob C
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March 24th, 2014 14:00
Hi there and thanks for the interesting question :)
You know, I'm just not sure about this. It is not a supported platform, but you might get _something_.
When we discover and classify Dell servers with Red Hat, we use the dmidecode command. Is this on Mac/BSD?
You may poke around this thread for a bit more detail. If you get it to work I'd like a screenshot!
Thanks and good luck,
Rob
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/f/4494/p/19564029/20575458.aspx#20575458
Ebonweaver
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March 24th, 2014 14:00
hmmm... so I see dmidecode is a pretty common include on linux distros including Ubuntu and Red Hat, but it's not on the Mac, probably because system profiler makes it entirely obsolete. I do see that if you install Ubuntu on a Mac the command works fine, but... The project of trying to compile the source code for the Mac is daunting and I find no evidence it's ever been done, again probably because it's normally pointless on the platform. Too bad OME can't query system profiler, but I guess that's outside the product intent ;) I don't know that the source will even compile on a Mac, and if it did what my deployment capability might be compared to expected Mac packages. Probably have to back burner this until I found a ton of free time or someone else answers the question one way or the other. Thanks for the info though!
DELL-Rob C
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March 24th, 2014 15:00
Ah, ok, well keep me posted if you turn back to this.
Thx!
cameronredux
615 Posts
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March 24th, 2014 15:00
http://www.paessler.com/knowledgebase/en/topic/41843-how-do-i-activate-snmp-on-mac-os-in-order-to-monitor-it-with-prtg
DELL-Rob C
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March 24th, 2014 15:00
Cool, thanks cameron.
So in theory, if you had a Mac SNMP MIB, you could import it to OME and get alerts for failing MacOS boxes(?)
maybe that is a small help.
Thx
Rob
Ebonweaver
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March 24th, 2014 16:00
We have some serious doubts that dmidecode can be made to run on a Mac based on this thread:
http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/topic/153582-smbios-dumper-and-matching-dmidecode/
As mentioned, system profiler is normally what people expect to use on a Mac, like this open source tool mentions:
http://forge.fusioninventory.org/projects/fusioninventory-agent/wiki/Get_Data_For_The_TestSuite
If OME ran system_profiler as an option as opposed to dmidecode when doing an SSH query, we'd be golden (and the outputs of these commands are very similar when you look at them, it's just formatting, but thousands of lines of it...). Otherwise, I think we're at a wall unfortunately. I can't find anything that converts between the two formats off hand.
Ebonweaver
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March 24th, 2014 16:00
Interesting idea, but I've had no luck with SNMP either, OME simply finds no information, I don't know why. It works on our printers, but it doesn't get anything from the Mac. I would note that the SNMP file in that article is VASTLY different and MUCH smaller than what is actually on the mac to begin with. I tried both modifying the built in file consistent with setting community name and so forth, and replacing it entirely with the example (modified for our site) in the article. Neither produced any results, but again I have no idea why as I haven't seen a way to see what OME's success or failure is a result of.
If I run the SNMP tester from that company http://www.paessler.com/tools/snmptester from the OME server and do a simple uptime or interfaces query over v1 I get the expected information, so it seems SNMP is running fine and is reachable, but OME isn't speaking the right language for some reason in this case. My only guess is that OME knows how to talk to various printers out of the box, but not a Mac. I don't know a great deal about SNMP, but I know it gets murky very very quickly with the OIDs and such...
Ebonweaver
23 Posts
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March 24th, 2014 16:00
Ok not sure what's wrong with the forum, but some posts are being denied because they say moderation of this forum requires approval before a post happens, others just post. Hopefully someone can look into that issue, and I'll keep trying to post what I'm trying to say...
It doesn't look like dmidecode will work on the Mac OS, and really system_profiler is what has to be used because it's already there and spits out a long dump similar to dmidecode. If OME had an option to run system_profiler (and of course understand the ouput format) instead of dmidecode, then we'd be golden as it would read Mac info out of the box. I think we're dead in the water with Mac stuff in OME until Dell adds that or someone writes a converter essentially.
DELL-Rob C
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March 24th, 2014 18:00
Hi there,
I'm not sure what is up with the moderation thing. I don't think that is supposed to happen. I'll have someone look into it.
Lot's of printers work since many use the industry standard printer.mib file. So you can often get lucky with printers.
We build in support for specific devices listed in the support matrix in the doc section of www.delltechcenter.com/ome. So I don't think you'll have much luck with Mac+SNMP. There was a shot with SSH/dmidecode, but it looks like you dug a bit on that.
I was thinking there was a chance to at least get SNMP alerts into the OME console if there was some MIB used for Mac that could be used for sending hardware alerts to OME from the Mac. But again, I'm not too familiar with Mac in this space.
That said, I'll surely forward your request to our product team for review. I'd also add I think we do have a fee-based offering in our KACE product.. But I'm not real familiar with it's full feature set.
Thanks again,
Rob