Install guide for ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 Beta and RedHat Client

Welcome to my guide
for installing the ConfigMgr 2012 Client onto RedHat 6 Enterprise Linux

ConfigMgr 2012 SP1
Beta brings cross-platform support, and here I’ll show you how to setup RedHat
and then install the ConfigMgr Client

There have been
third-party extensions to achieve this before, especially from well-known
company Quest (they do AD PoSH too, very nice) that allowed you to extend
ConfigMgr 2007 into the Linux\UNIX estates, but now we have for the first time
this built-In to the product

Before we begin you
will need to download a few items off the internet and configure a few VM’s

Download Cache

Download the
following content

Linux Integration Services Version v3.4 for Hyper-V

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34603

Download the ISO and the PDF

The
PDF states:

This
version of Linux Integration Services supports the following guest operating
systems:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7,
5.8, 6.0-6.3 x86 and
x64

Download RedHat 6 Enterprise Server (was 6.3 at the
time of writing)

Visit
www.redhat.com and go through the
registration process to get an evaluation of the OS

Go
register at RedHat and get yourself either RedHat Enterprise server V6 (latest
is 6.3 – Santiago), V5 or V4

Go
get the RedHat Client

Go
make yourself a ConfigMgr 2012 Beta 1 Site using this guide, or the myriad of
others on the web (also requires downloads)

RedHat Client for ConfigMgr 2012 SP1 Beta

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34609

Virtual Machines needed to work through this guide

You’ll need to setup
a few VM’s to assist with the lab, most importantly a VM to contain a ConfigMgr
2012 SP1 Beta Site server, another to act as a Domain Controller for the Site
server and another to receive the RedHat installation so that we can test the
Client

Create a VM with 1GB
of memory, reconfigure so it has the Legacy Network Adapter, and insert the RedHat ISO. I use Hyper-V
in Windows Server 2012 RTM to do this

Begin installing RedHat

Once the VM is
ready, boot it up

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Select the language
you want to use for the OS here, for this guide I’ll use English

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Select the keyboard
layout

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Tab around until you
can select Basic Storage Devices

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Press Alt-Y to
Select Yes, discard any data

Give it a name

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Press Alt-S to
Select System clock uses UTC

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Enter a password for
the administrator account called root

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Press tab until you
can select Use All Space

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Panic! Run for the
hills!

It’s asking us to
set up the disk partitioning and there is a lot there that a Windows
Administrator won’t be overly familiar with, fortunately for us it already
configured so all we need to do is …

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

More Panic!

It really just wants
to format the disk so …

Press Alt-F to
Select Format

Press Alt-W to Write changes to disk

It’ll format,
configure the disk and create the partitions with the Ext4 file system

Once it’s done keep
the defaults

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

Tab until you can
select Desktop

Press Alt-N to
Select Next

The installation
process will start now. It’ll doesn’t take too long, I logged 14 minutes with
1096 packages needed to be installed

Press Alt-t to
Select Reboot

Now we need to
finish off the second stage of the installation before arriving at the desktop

Press Alt-F to
Select Forward

Press Alt-Y to
Select the License agreement

Press Alt-F to
Select Forward

It won’t be able to
setup updates right now so …

Press Alt-F to
Select Forward

Punch in some
details for your first user account, Unix\Linux like to separate the
Administrator and User at this stage

Press Alt-F to
Select Forward

Configure the date
and time, it should already be current

Press Alt-F to
Select Forward

I’ve only given it
1GB of memory

Press Alt-O to
Select OK if it appears for you

If kdump is
installed it introduce a reboot before bringing you back here

Press Alt-F to
Select Finish

The installer will
now reboot and bring up the GUI

We need a Shell to
mount the ISO and then install the Integration services

Press Ctrl + Alt +
F2

Tap in root and
press enter

Tap in the root
password

Integration services

Now insert the Linux Integration Services Version v3.4 for Hyper-V
ISO into the VM so it can be mounted from within the VM

The PDF describes in
detail how to install and I repeat here

Enter the following
commands

mount
/dev/cdrom /media

cd
/media/RHEL63

./install.sh

reboot

It just takes a
couple of minutes to install

Now log into the GUI

There’s a list of
the shortcuts available for the Gnome desktop here

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/011sep05/features/shortcuts/

At this point I log
in as root, this is a very bad practice, but for this lab guide I’ll cut right
through it with administrator privileges by default

Tap in root and
press enter

Tap in that password
for the root account you entered earlier

Oh yeah baby, be
careful not to step on the grass …

We can use the mouse
from now on, instead of keyboard shortcuts

Tick Do not show me this again

Click Close

The Desktop being
used is called Gnome. There are loads of guides on how to use it so I’ll stop
short of providing any, open a web search and you’ll discover them

We now need to give
the server an IP address

Configure the IP

Really straight
forward, and not entirely necessary if you have functioning DHCP with valid DNS name servers.

You can either click the icon that looks like the one above, it is
located top right of the Gnome desktop, it will only show up if you chose the
Legacy Network Adapter, or visit System > Preferences > Network
Connections

Enable networking
for eht0, setup static IP address with correct DNS name server address and
other details

Get the Client files over to the RedHat 6 Enterprise
server

Several methods for
moving the new agent files across, SAMBA, FTP, ISO, I’m sure there are many
more, but I’ll settle for the two easy ones

Mount a Windows Network Share

In Linux\Unix you
mount devices to folders and then navigate into the folders to view the mounted
devices content. This means you’ll need a new directory in the /mnt folder to
act as the destination for the mount of the Windows share. To get things going
…

Open a shell window

mkdir
/mnt/<the share name>

mount
-t cifs -o username=<>,password=<> //servername/share /mnt/<the share name>

Note: Above is an example of accessing a
Windows 2012 server’s d$ administrative share

Now just navigate
into the newly created folder using the shell with the ls /mnt/labd command, or use the File Browser and you’ll see
your Windows Share contents

File Browser

Shell

Use an ISO

Put the folders for
each additional client onto the root folder of an ISO and mount it in the VM
then mount it in the OS.

When creating the
ISO put the RedHat Client into a root folder called RHEL, and do the same for
any other additional clients you are going to be testing

Open a new shell
window

Enter the following
commands

insmod
/lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/ata/ata_piix.ko

mount
/dev/cdrom /media

cd
/media/RHEL

Now you have access
to the installation mechanism called ‘install’ via the ISO or Windows Share

Install the Agent

The documentation is
a bit out of skew with the SP1 Beta release, it includes incorrect log path
references as well as incorrect switch syntax and some missing steps here and
there. During the evaluation a few times you’ll need to wander off into the wilderness
(Plenty of web search and RTM) and figure out a Linux\UNIX issue before you can
proceed, if you’ve used Linux/UNIX before then you’ll sail through quickly.
This will all be sorted by RTM time, as many of us MVP’s and non-MVP’s are
feeding back suggestions for change to smsdocs@microsoft.com, so that the docs
team can add them to their existing change list if the issue hasn’t already
been discovered

Here is the
Microsoft documentation for installing the RedHat 6 Enterprise (RHEL) Client

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj573939

To install the
client enter the following commands in a shell

chmod
+x install

./install
-mp lab1cm12.smslab.com -sitecode L01 ccm-RHEL6x64.1.0.0-1510_20120827.1.tar

Note: You will need to replace the FQDN and the
Site Code with your site servers FQDN and Site Code

The Agent is
installed now

Check out the Client Resource record

Over on the
ConfigMgr SP1 Beta Console you will see the Client Resource record appear,
click refresh if it doesn’t show

The properties for
this new clients Resource record show that it registered using the MP and has
sent a Heartbeat

The actual resource
record will show as Not
approved, and as a result this induces catastrophic failure on the beta
Agent. I initially discovered this while putting the Agent onto SUSE and filed
it as a bug on Connect. I was fortunate enough to see an answer on this one
coming from Microsoft

Previously you could
see in the Console that the Client is not approved, it’s a known issue and to
work around it we first have to select the resource record and Approve it
(Ribbon or Right-Click on the Resource record)

Click this icon on
the Ribbon or get to it via a right-click off the Resource record

Select Yes to
approve this RedHat Client

Fix Policy and Inventory processing (Beta issue)

Back to RedHat and a
shell

First stop the Agent service (Daemon in Linux\UNIX
speak)

/opt/microsoft/configmgr/bin/ccmexec
-s

Delete the policy cookie which seems to be causing the
issue

We now need to visit
a folder that is used by a service called Nanowbem, which as it’s name implies reproduces WMI on Linux\UNIX

Delete the cookie
file using the following command

rm
-f /opt/microsoft/configmgr/root/ccm/policy/servercookies.xml

Now start the Agent service

/opt/microsoft/configmgr/bin/ccmexec
-d

The log file should
show a lot of policy activity now, far more than you saw previously

Force Policy download and evaluation again

ccmexec
-rs policy

The log file should
show a lot of policy processing now, this is the equivilent to a Windows Client
receiving its first Machine Policy (User Policy is not supported on Linux\UNIX)

Force an out-of-schedule Hardware Inventory

ccmexec
-rs hinv

Hardware Inventory
will now be compiled and sent to the Management Point

View the Hardware Inventory using Resource Explorer

Now we can view the
Hardware Inventory using Resource Explorer

Back to the Site
server, select the RedHat Client resource record and on the Ribbon select
Device\Start\Resource Explorer

The Inventory
payload arrived and was processed successfully

List of log files for RedHat 6 Enterprise Linux

/var/opt/microsoft/scxcm.log

This is the Shared Cross-platform Client log file where you’ll see start-up, regular operations, Policy retrieval and processing and Inventory processing and transmission.

/opt/microsoft/nanowbem/var/log folder

This contains a few log files used by Nanowbem service

List of CCMEXEC switches

To get a list of
CCMEXEC switches type the following in a shell

/opt/microsoft/configmgr/bin/ccmexec
–help

Summary

The Client is now
ready for deployments to take place. You just need to setup the Network Access
Account since the Client is treated as an Internet client, so that it can get
access to content on the Site servers DP without having to be in the Active Directory
domain that the Site server resides in.

I’m writing part II
of this guide now to run through deploying an application to this new RedHat
Client, I hope this guide or accelerator gets you reviewing the new
cross-platform client for ConfigMgr 2012 on RedHat 6