Comments on: IBM Director 5.20.x – worth using or not?

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:43:00 +0000

Boy, are you having a bad day While I feel your pain and misery, I must admit that your comment made me laugh out loud. You are echoing the exact feelings my senior architect and I have been saying for the past few years.

By: Niczar

Niczar — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:56:00 +0000

Director is complete crap. The agent comes with its own outdated JRE. Then when you look at the various shell scripts, you almost die of laughter; it’s so bad, it looks like a DOS .BAT programmer from 1981 was just defrozen. I think it’s the whole division at IBM responsible for management software that’s completely incompetent. Sometimes they almost make the megafailures at EMC look good (not that much though).nnThey consistently deliver broken software. Their automagic update system — “UpdateXpress” — is a rotten Rube Goldberg contraption. It cannot run without an executable /tmp. It cannot run as a non-privileged user even if you’re just trying to download files. It wants you to install Firefox and all dependencies on your server. It contains its own outdated JRE, evidently. It writes temporary files in /var/log/IBM_something. Frankly, the only humane thing to do at this point is to take all the people responsible for these software products, line them against a wall and fire.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:36:53 +0000

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By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 21:59:13 +0000

Jivetolkein you don’t speak jive you speak the truth.

Our company has been dealing with director for over 7 years. Not fully understanding the complexity of the install was our first mistake. How the subsequent upgrades were conducted without making sure all those running processes were not killed was our second, and then having the RSA cards installed on newer servers without configuring them was our third.

For us the agent services that run never fail, they just don’t work. I can’t say they don’t work most of the time because I don’t know, and neither does the agent. The number 1 hardware alert that we would like to see are raid failures. If you use ADAPTEC SCSI drivers you need to install the Director Extension software, if you have LSI you don’t we found this out late in the game to. Oh by the way we have about 1200 IBM servers.

I also should mention the memory leaks from running IBM processes. IBM always indicates that the problem is fixed in the next release. Kind of a shell game isn’t.

To me the bottom-line is that I wouldn’t mind so much dealing with the install/deployment issues if at the end of the day each deployment on a regular basis would send a message out that each monitor hardware component is working. Since I can no longer rely on faith we will probably be going in a different direction.

By: steve

steve — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:14:05 +0000

Sorry for the confusion. I rechecked the IBM website and they are called the mapping layer and not the midllayer. As an example, suppose you have an IBM x336 server. You would go to the IBM website and in the download area select “OSA IPMI” in the “Refine results” drop-down box and click “Go”. Here you will see IBM Mapping Layer for OSA for W2K3 as well as the OSA IPMI device drivers. Install the device drivers first and the mapping layer software second.

Hope that helps.

By: Ben

Ben — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 03:22:50 +0000

Thank you for the reply, Steve,
Now when you say “midlayer”, which driver are you referring to? The IBM website does not seem to use the term “midlayer” for any of their drivers. And for me, this pertains to Windows 2003.

Thanks,

By: steve

steve — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:17:50 +0000

Ben,
There are a lot of drivers to obtain from IBM depending on the OS and the box. For Redhat Linux 3 prior to Update 9, you will have to get the IPMI drivers and midlayer code from the IBM website for your server model. If you are running RHEL 4 or 5, then it will use OpenIPMI.

If you are using Windows 2003, then there are drivers for IPMI and midlayer as well. You must install the drivers first according to IBM technical support.

In all cases, you must also be running the Broadcom drivers from IBM support website ONLY. They have made modifications for support of the BMC which shares the NIC. It makes a big difference.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 16:52:06 +0000

What drivers did IBM exactly state needed to be installed on a client machine, in order for it to correctly report hardware errors?

By: jivetolkein

jivetolkein — Tue, 05 May 2009 14:40:10 +0000

Nagios is an excellent service monitor, but for hardware managemnt you’d be reduced to rolling your own queries to SNMP/WMI by proxy etc. I’ve run both, but it’s fish and fowl IMHO.

All I’d like Director to do is reliably and consistently check the hardware status and give PFAs when available. In all it’s incarnations it’s been really bad at this – my experience mirrors virtually all the above. If I build a server, using ServerGuide and my own bits and pieces we get OK results – it works, but their are still foibles that frustrate and annoy (hardware status – show me the status even if there isn’t a problem!!). But I’m trying to roll in servers of indeterminate build all across EMEA, the only thing in common is an IBM badge, and I’ve little to no faith it’s accurately checking them :-/

By: IBM Director 6.1 — still no joy | Just A Word (or two) From Steve

IBM Director 6.1 — still no joy | Just A Word (or two) From Steve — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 01:38:05 +0000

[...] previously wrote about the problems and issues with version 5.20.x and that we were looking forward to seeing what 6.1 was going to provide. Well, we downloaded [...]