[dedicated thread] Dell Open Manage Appliance

AtaxyaNetwork

@heNorthernLight guest-tools and SELinux, I bypass it, but it's not the best case I can achieve. I am working on a better fix

archw

@lakpyro
I'd love to see what you did!
On the GRUB password thing, I cheated and opened it with another instance os SLES and jacked around with the menus from a working system. I tried a million things but could never get the tools installation to work!

Mount up basically any linux installer or system rescue ISO.
Boot into that (If using SLES, go to other options and select "RESCUE MODE" and wait).... get a shell...
This will let you ssh into it
sudo ssh-keygen -A
sudo service ssh --full-restart
ip addr # so I can know how to get in from putty
cat $PATH
passwd (makes a new password so you can ssh inot it)
/sbin/sshd

lvdisplay
mkdir -p /mnt/sysimage/boot
mount /dev/xvda2 /mnt/sysimage/boot
mount /dev/OMCAppVG/LVRoot /mnt/sysimage
mount -t proc none /mnt/sysimage/proc
mount -o bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev
mount -o bind /run /mnt/sysimage/run
/mnt/sysimage
for x in sys proc run dev tmp; do mount --bind /$x /mnt/sysimage/$x; done
chroot /mnt/sysimage

I saw these instructions somone where but I coudl not figure out these steps ?

8 ) Enable root logins in /etc/ssh/sshd_config

Enable sshd via: systemctl enable sshd
Set a temporary password for root via passwd
Exit the chroot and the installer/rescue image... let it boot back into OME
Cache your ssh key in root's keystore via whatever method you like... my preferred is ssh-copy-id
Remove root's temporary password...

flakpyro

So testing the appliance and here is what i have encountered so far:

Boots up no problem, XO sees tools installed and all stats work.

It took me two attempts to upgrade it to 4.4.0.75, the first attempt failed, i reverted a snapshot from before trying and upon trying again it was successful.

However i can no longer install / update plugins, back to throwing disk space capacity errors. I'm guessing whatever was modified in the appliance you shared was reverted by the update which now causes it to think there is no disk space again.

AtaxyaNetwork

@rchw Thanks for the idea ! I'll try this

@lakpyro yeah unfortunately I think dell overwrite every file when updating the appliance. It will be an issue for every update.

I can try to prepare an up-to-date instance and give it to you, if you want. But I'll need to regenerate the appliance each time an update is available and depending on if dell is providing regulars updates, I can be annoying

stormi

Could someone summarize this thread for me (XCP-ng Product Owner) so that I see what could be worth tracking and/or doing on our side?

AtaxyaNetwork

@tormi TLDR: xen-blkfront and xen-netfront drivers are missing
More info here: https://blog.ataxya.net/add-xen-driver-to-ome-dell-open-manage-enterprise/

AtaxyaNetwork

@tormi Also, some bit of code are hardcoded with /dev/sd*, I changed that to /dev/xvd*

flakpyro

@taxyaNetwork I understand it would be a lot of work to make a new XVA every time Dell updates the appliance. Would it be possible to write a shell script that we could copy to the appliance and run after the fact that could change the /dev/sda to /dev/xvda in the needed files perhaps? I can try running it on my updated appliance you sent me, im just not sure where the drives are being referenced.

Something like

sed -i -e 's/sda/xvda/g' /etc/whatever.conf?

AtaxyaNetwork

@lakpyro it's a possibility, but I don't know how dell manage it appliance. But worth to try !

archw

@taxyaNetwork
BTW...how in the world did you add the guest tools? I messed around with that while watching two movies a few Sundays ago and finally gave up!

flakpyro

@taxyaNetwork are you able to list the files that require these drive name modifications? I can try changing them on the latest updated version of the appliance.

AtaxyaNetwork

@rchw I added them in live mode, when I was chrooed in the SLES disk. But I have a problem with SELinux, sometimes the tools are not working because SELinux block the service. For now, I deactivated SELinux, but I don't like this workaround.

@lakpyro the two files are

    /opt/dell/omc/utilities/tui/bin/ome_disk_config.sh
    /opt/dell/mcsi/appliance/scripts/appliance_ressource.sh