-C H A P T E R

C H A P T E R 1

Introduction

The Sun trademark Control Station is a software package that allows administrators to take control of their hosts: tracking and applying software updates, deploying new services, monitoring the health and performance of hosts. More than just a typical "systems" management device, the Sun Control Station is a platform that will help you in the "life-cycle" management of your hosts, from initial setup through eventual redeployment at the end of useful life. As an added benefit, customers can continue to use third-party or homegrown software in conjunction with the Sun Control Station.

The Sun Control Station consists of two parts: a core framework that is the engine for executing control modules, and the built-in control modules themselves. These control modules can come from Sun Microsystems, Inc., from third-party vendors or from your own in-house design team. The Sun Control Station ships with five pre-installed modules: Performance Monitoring, Inventory, Software Management, Health Monitoring and Lights Out Management (LOM).

Through the Sun Control Station, you can fully control the distribution of software payloads, offering customized and tailor-made services to downstream and end-user customers. Service Providers can offer unique payloads, data or software monitoring services. By leveraging the Sun BlueLinQ technology, all available software updates and patches can be accessed and distributed to your managed hosts, as designated by the Administrator. Custom-built and third-party software can also be distributed. Furthermore, software packages can be "published" so that BlueLinQ-enabled clients--including other Sun Control Stations--can view and download these packages.

The Sun Control Station can manage the following Sun servers and Sun Cobalt trademark server appliances. At the time of printing, this list was complete.

Note - For managed hosts other than Sun Cobalt server appliances, you may first need to install and enable the control-station agent on the host.

Refer to the PDF Software Installation for instructions on installing and enabling the agent.

Sun LX50 servers, all languages

Sun Fire V60x servers and Sun Fire V65x servers

Netra T1 servers (Solaris Operating System 8 and Solaris OS 9)

Netra X1 servers (Solaris OS 8 and Solaris OS 9)

Netra T1120-1125 servers (Solaris OS 8 and Solaris OS 9)

Ultra 1 servers (Solaris OS 8 and Solaris OS 9)

Ultra 2 servers (Solaris OS 8 and Solaris OS 9)

Ultra 5-10 servers (Solaris OS 8 and Solaris OS 9)

Ultra 80 servers (Solaris OS 8 and Solaris OS 9)

any x86-based server running the following operating systems (OSs):

Red Hat 7.2

Red Hat 7.3

Red Hat 8.0

Red Hat 9.0

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1

Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 2.1

Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 2.1

Sun Cobalt RaQ 550 server appliances, English and Japanese

Sun Cobalt RaQ XTR server appliances, English and Japanese

Sun Cobalt CacheRaQ 4 server appliances, English

Sun Cobalt Qube 3 appliances, all versions (English, Japanese, multilingual)

Services on the Sun Control Station

Here is a sample of what you can do with the Sun Control Station:

Inventory Management. You can obtain detailed information on the hardware components installed in a managed host.

Software Management. The Administrator can keep systems current using the version-tracking feature for software patches and updates. You can also deploy custom software or data.

Local Software Repository. In conjunction with Software Management, you can use the local software repository to "publish" software package files and allow the Administrator or end users of various hosts to install available package files as desired or needed. You can configure your Sun Control Station to view "published" package files and share package files with other BlueLinQ-enabled servers.

OS Installation. The AllStart control module integrates both Kickstart (a Red Hat feature) and AutoYaST (a SuSE feature) technologies to provide a quick and unified method of installing and customizing Linux-based systems. The control module provides a common user interface for creating software payloads, defining client profiles, and monitoring and validating system installations and updates.

Health and Performance Monitoring. These control modules provide system alerts and the metrics of the basic operations of the hosts, allowing you to pinpoint potential causes of failure.

Lights Out Management (LOM). The LOM control module allows you to perform certain management functions remotely on hosts that are compliant with the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) version 1.5, such as powering on or off a host, and viewing current System Event Log (SEL) information from a a host.

These services can be used within an extranet or an intranet environment, or across the Internet.

General information

Task Progress dialog

When you launch a task (for example, when creating a backup file for the Sun Control Station or adding a control module), a Task Progress dialog appears in the user interface (UI). This dialog has a Status field indicating the current status of the task and a progress bar. When the progress bar displays 100%, the task has completed.

See FIGURE 1-1 for a sample.

If you want to perform another task in the UI while the current task is underway, you can put the Task Progress dialog in the background. Simply click the button labelled Run Task In Background below the progress bar.

To return to the Task Progress dialog, select Administration > Tasks on the left. The Task table appears. If the task is still underway, a status message is displayed in the Duration column. Click on the progress-bar icon in this column to re-display the Task Progress dialog for this task.

Once the task is complete and the progress bar displays 100%, two buttons appear below the Task Progress dialog: Done and View Events.

To view the list of events associated with the task just completed, click View Events. The Events For <Task> table appears. If you then click the up-arrow icon in the top-right corner, the Tasks table appears.

To return to the previous screen, click Done.

FIGURE 1-1 Sample Shot of a Task Progress dialog

This screenshot shows a sample of the Task Progress dialog; the buttons are Done and View Events.

Schedule

The Schedule feature (also referred to as the Scheduler) allows you to schedule a task or tasks to be performed at a later time.

Many of the tasks on the Sun Control Station can be scheduled. In this case, a button labelled Schedule appears in the table or selector window of the final step.

The Scheduler works in the same way for any task:

1. Fill in the necessary fields for the task.

2. Click Schedule.

The Schedule Settings For <Task> appears; see FIGURE 1-2 for a sample.

3. Configure the schedule settings.

The following settings are available for any scheduled task:

Run Date And Time: Enter the date on which you want the task to run, in the format: MM/DD/YYYY hh:mm.

You can also click the calendar icon next to this field. A separate browser window opens. Choose the date and time for the scheduled task. Hit the Enter (or Return) key on your keyboard. The date and time now appear in the field.

Email Address (Optional): Enter an email address of the person who will be notified when the task runs.

Notify When Starting: Enable the check box to notify the person when the task is starting.

Notify When Finished: Enable the check box to notify the person when the task has completed.

4. For some functions, you can set the frequency of the task with a pull-down menu above the table (for example, hourly or daily).

5. Click Cancel or Save.

If you click Cancel, the scheduled task is not saved. The Scheduled Tasks table appears, but without the task you just cancelled.

If you click Save, the scheduled task is added to the list of scheduled tasks. The Scheduled Tasks table appears with the new task.

6. In this table, you can view details for, modify or delete a scheduled task.

To view the details of a scheduled task, click the magnifying-glass icon.

To modify a scheduled task, click the pencil icon.

To delete a scheduled task, click the delete icon.

FIGURE 1-2 Sample of a Scheduler table

This screenshot shows a sample of the table for scheduling a task; the buttons are Save and Cancel.

Online documentation

To access the PDF file for a user manual, click on the Online Documentation icon in the top-right corner. A separate browser window opens displaying a list of PDF files available. Click the link for a PDF file; you can open the PDF file in the browser window or save it to your personal computer.

If you have installed third-party software on the Sun Control Station, the relevant documentation is also available here.

Icons

There are two icons in the top-right corner of the UI:

Online Documentation

Logout

Online Documentation

The documentation icon You can access the user manuals in PDF format from the UI.

Logout

You Click the Logout icon to log out of the system.

Resetting the Administrator Password

Note - This procedure only resets the Administrator password for logging in to the Sun Control Station UI.

To reset manually the Administrator password for logging in to the UI:

1. ssh in to the control station.

2. If you are not currently root, become root.

su -

3. Generate an encrypted password for the user name admin and password admin.

/usr/bin/htpasswd -n -s -b admin  admin

admin:{SHA}0DPiKuNIrrVmD8IUCuw1hQxNqZc=

4. Copy the entire string following admin:{SHA}.

0DPiKuNIrrVmD8IUCuw1hQxNqZc=

5. Paste this string into the password attribute for the user tag in the following file.

/var/tomcat4/webapps/sdui/WEB-INF/database.xml

6. Stop and then restart tomcat.

dtomcat4 stop

dtomcat4 start

You can now log in to the control station UI as the user name admin with the password admin.

To change the Administrator password through the UI, see Password.