Unable to connect to remote agent

Hello,

I am new to this forum and 24x7 Scheduler.

We installed 24x7 Scheduler Multi-platform edition version 4.3 on a Windows XP machine and on a HP ia64 machine running HP-UX for evaluating 24x7 Scheduler. We are able to run both master and agent on both Windows XP machine and HP-UX machine. We are also able to connect to remote agent running on Windows XP machine from master running on HP-UX machine. However, we are NOT able to connect remote agent running on HP-UX machine from master running on Windows XP machine. Kindly note that at any time we ran only either master or agent, not both of them on a single machine. The log of remote agent running on HP-UX machine shows the message "An error occurred during authentication". Following are the relevant details used in connectivity

On agent running on HP-UX:

Password authentication method: PAM
TCP/IP Port: 1096

On master running on Windows:

Location : <HP>
Port : 1096
Agent Type: 24x7 Agent Multi-platform Edition

To test connectivity we tried keeping both User and Password fields empty as well as feeding root and root's password. In both cases, agent log shows "An error occurred during authentication".

Please help to resolve this issue.

Regards

On the master computer please open DOS command prompt and execute telnet your_HP_machine_IP_address 1096
Do you get a blank screen or cannot connect error?

Thanks

Thank you for your reply.

Yes, I am able to get a blank screen when I execute telnet your_HP_machine_IP_address 1096

Kindly note that we are using the evaluation version of 24x7 Scheduler

Because telnet command can connect to the agent, it is most likely a user authentication issue that causing agent to deny your conenctions. Please check which authentication method is selected in the agents' properties. If it is PAM, verify /pam/jscheduler file has been copied to the system's PAM directory. If you are not sure, see readme.txt file in the agent directory, section 6 "Configuring PAM security." If it is FTP, verify local ftpd daemon is running and listening on the default FTP port. If it isn ot running, please start it. If all of that is fine, enable "traceEnabled" option in the agent's preferences.xml file and restart the agent. Try connecting again and check what you get in debug.log file. It should have some messages describing authentication failures. Please let us know what you get in the debug.log.

Thank you. FTP authentication is working!

For PAM authentication, the readme.txt is not clear for us for what actions to be carried out on HP-UX. You are asking us to copy /pam/jscheduler whereas readme.txt not advising so. Let me paste the PAM configuring section here. Kindly provide specific set of actions to be carried out HP-UX machine for PAM authentication. Thanks in advance.

6. Configuring PAM security (Unix/Linux)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Linux you need to copy /pam/jscheduler file to your PAM configuration
directory:
cp <path>/pam/jscheduler /etc/pam.d/
This will work for RedHat Linux. On SuSe Linux, the configuration is
otherwise the same but pam_unix.so is used instead of pam_pwdb.so. So you need to
edit the copied file jscheduler and replace in the file text "pam_pwdb" with
"pam_unix"

On Sun Solaris you need to edit /etc/pam.conf file and add the following lines:
jscheduler auth required /usr/lib/security/pam_unix.so debug
jscheduler account required /usr/lib/security/pam_unix.so debug
jscheduler password required /usr/lib/security/pam_unix.so debug
jscheduler session required /usr/lib/security/pam_unix.so debug

On HP-UX
jscheduler auth required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1
jscheduler account required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1
jscheduler password required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1
jscheduler session required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1

On AIX configuration methods differ for different versions. For more details
see http://www.feep.net/PAM/AIX. This page describes in detail how to use
PAM with AIX

IBM also provides a document describing PAM implementation on different
systems and their comparison. You can read it here
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/eserver/library/es-compaixsolaris/

Hi, there is an instruction in the first section of the readme file "1. Installation on Unix/Linux systems" to copy jscheduler file to PAM directory
cp <path_to_installation_dir>/pam/jscheduler /etc/pam.d

Running auth.pl <username> <password> gives the following error

# ./auth.pl <username> <password>
Can't locate Authen/PAM.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /opt/perl_32/lib/5.8.8/IA64.ARCHREV_0-thread-multi /opt/perl_32/lib/5.8.8 /opt/perl_32/lib/site_perl/5.8.8/IA64.ARCHREV_0-thread-multi /opt/perl_32/lib/site_perl/5.8.8 /opt/perl_32/lib/site_perl /opt/perl_32/lib/vendor_perl/5.8.8/IA64.ARCHREV_0-thread-multi /opt/perl_32/lib/vendor_perl/5.8.8 /opt/perl_32/lib/vendor_perl .) at ./auth.pl line 7.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./auth.pl line 7.

This indicates one of the following:
The perl-Authen-PAM library we discussed awhile back was not installed, was not compiled successfully, was not installed successfully, or was not installed in the default location for Perl modules on your system.
Please verify your installation and paths.

In case you don't have Perl Authen::PAM module installed on your system, you can download it here http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/N/NI/NIKIP/Authen-PAM-0.16.tar.gz
Save it to /tmp directory.

	Code:
	cd /tmp tar -zxvf Authen-PAM-0.16.tar.gz cd Authen-PAM-0.16 perl Makefile.PL make make install

Hope this helps

After deploying Authen::PAM module on our HP-UX machine, when we run auth.pl we get the following error:

“Shared object load failure”

Please suggest a solution.

So it was not deployed at the time we originally talked about it?

Have your sysadmin check syslog and other logs that might give some insight into the PAM configuration on your system or the Perl library he installed to interact with it. Those are unrelated to the scheduler. I googled and found this:

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1285663606586+28353475&threadId=977826
(issues with pam.conf.)

There seem to be a number of issues surrounding PAM on HP that can result in the "shared object load failure" that your sysadmin probably knows about. You might look at a tester application like http://pamtester.sourceforge.net/.

Yes, PAM was installed at the time we originally talked about this but not authen::PAM.

We resolved this problem by modifying pam.conf to entries like

jscheduler account required libpam_hpsec.so.1
jscheduler account required libpam_unix.so.1
....
....

instead of those provided in the readme.txt

On HP-UX
jscheduler auth required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1
jscheduler account required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1
jscheduler password required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1
jscheduler session required /usr/lib/security/libpam_unix.1

You may modify readme.txt to reflect this.

Thank you for your feedback. I'm glad you succeeded in resolving the PAM issue.

With your permissions we will add HP-UX specific reference for PAM config to the readme file. It may help somebody else too.