CentOS Data Protector agent unable to be installed

A customer asked me today for some help with a CentOS server that wouldn't install properly, despite everything looking OK.

The session went like this.

# ./omnisetup.sh -server cellmgr.ifost.org.au -install da,autodr
Cannot access the Cell Manager system (inet is not responding)....

As the cell manager was known to be working, we didn't need to check connectivity to 5555 on the cell manager. I suggested just running the installation (without the cell manager import first)

# ./omnisetup.sh -install da,autodr

This worked fine. Was the disk agent listening?

# netstat -an | grep 5555
tcp6   0   0   :::5555 :::*    LISTEN

That's odd: why IPv6? The cell manager had IPv6 disabled, so that would certainly have stopped things working.

# grep FLAGS /etc/xinet.d/omni
FLAGS = IPV6

That's that one explained... use your favourite editor (vi, nano, emacs, gedit...) to set FLAGS = IPV4 if you happen to encounter it. (Don't forget to run service xinetd restart )

But things still weren't working: CentOS has a host-based firewall. As we didn't have a media agent, the only relevant port is tcp 5555.

# firewall-cmd --add-port 5555/tcp --permanent
# firewall-cmd --reload

And then everything worked correctly.

Thanks to Glen Thompson for doing most of the work investigating this one!

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Installing Data Protector cell manager on a minimal-install Redhat 7 / Centos 7

This is more of a note to myself, but if you do a "minimal" install of RedHat or Centos, you will be missing a number of important packages.

Here's what I do to fix this, before running omnisetup.sh

echo 'PATH=$PATH:/opt/omni/bin:/opt/omni/sbin:/opt/omni/lbin' \
        > /etc/profile.d/omni.sh
chmod +x /etc/profile.d/omni.sh
. /etc/profile.d/omni.sh

useradd -m hpdp
yum install net-tools bc xinetd glibc.i686 
yum install bind-utils psmisc mlocate telnet
     ;# not really necessary, but so useful...

mkdir -p /etc/opt/omni/server
chmod a+rx /etc/opt/omni/server

Then edit  /etc/man_db.conf and add the following two lines in the appropriate stanzas.
 MANPATH_MAP /opt/omni/bin /opt/omni/lib/man
 MANDB_MAP /opt/omni/lib/man /var/cache/man/omni

You probably won't need a firewall on your Data Protector cell manager. In any case, the installer doesn't add exceptions to the firewalling rules like it does on Windows, so the cell manager can't import itself or start properly.

systemctl stop firewalld
systemctl disable firewalld

Now you can run
  omnisetup.sh -CM -IS -install da,ma,cc,StoreOnceSoftware,autodr

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published book on HP Data Protector (http://x.ifost.org.au/dp-book). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector