The collector requires a valid license provided in the file /etc/pscollect/license. Licenses may be obtained from <support@par-tec.com>.

All remote agents, launched by the collector, will by default be started using ssh. Therefore, the user pscd on the collector node must be able to login to each cluster node without providing a password or pass phrase.

To enable this "auto-login", a ssh key, e.g. ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub, of user pscd on the collector node must be added to its own ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and the authorized_keys of this user on all other nodes.

Typically, BMCs share one of the network interfaces with the server. Quite often, the BMC is only reachable from other nodes, not from the local host itself. To circumvent this problem, the collector may be advised to use the local kernel interface to read data from the local BMC. To do so, the special name localhost must be used as BMC name when calling the impi_host() mapping function.

    ipmi_host("master","localhost")
      

Refer to the section called “Configuring the collector – step 6” for details.

To enable the collector to read data for the local node using the command ipmitool, the collector must be able to access the IPMI device /dev/ipmi0. In order to do so, the following lines must be added to the file /etc/sudoers:

     Defaults:pscd   passwd_tries=0, !syslog
     pscd    ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/ipmitool -A none \
       -I open -H localhost [a-zA-Z/]*, /usr/bin/ipmitool -A none -I open \
       -H localhost -S [a-zA-Z /]*
      

To enable the collector to read and monitor disk parameters using S.M.A.R.T, the command smartctl, launched by the agent process, must be able to access the raw disk devices, like /dev/hda. To do so, the following lines must be added to the file /etc/sudoers:

    Defaults:pscd   passwd_tries=0, !syslog
    pscd    ALL=NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/smartctl \
      -[iAH] /dev/[sh]d[a-z], /usr/sbin/smartctl \
      -d ata -[iAH] /dev/[sh]d[a-z]
      

This has to be done on all nodes of the cluster.