Network Node Manager 7.0
Known Problems and Workarounds

General Information

See the Release Notes addendum for any more recent updates or workarounds.

For information on getting the Java Plug-in or checking for patches, see the Supported Configurations document.

There is also a troubleshooting section below.

Known Problems

Installation

Using an NFS mounted CD drive for installation

When exporting a remote CD drive to be used for installing NNM, you must specifically give 'root' access to the drive. Use a line similar to the following on the machine that has the CD drive installed on it:

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System Firewall Configuration

If you have a firewall installed on your system, you must make sure that it allows loopback (127.0.0.1) access.

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Printing on Linux

The xpr rpm package should be installed on the system in order to facilitate printing on Linux. The server should be configured for Printing options for Dynamic Views and all the other applications

Requesting Evaluation Licenses for ECS Designer

Use the forms in the $OV_CONF/OVLicense/nnm/forms/C directory to make password requests for the "HP OpenView ECS Designer for the NNM product. The forms in the $OV_CONF/ecs/forms/C directory are for the standalone ECS Designer product only and should not be used.

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Rpm Error During Installation

While installing NNM the following error may occur -

rpmdb: region error detected; run recovery.
error: db4 error(-30981) from dbenv->open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - (-30981)
The following command has to be run to remove this error.
$ rpm --rebuilddb
The installation has to be repeated from the beginning. The installation so started may give errors because of the previous installation failure. In such a case nnm must be uninstalled and then NNM has to be re-installed.

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Dynamic Views

Labels

Changing labels in ovw will not affect the label seen in any Dynamic Views.  This is because the labels come from topology, and ovw stores labels locally.

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Right-Click

Right-click menu items may drop off the bottom of the visible pane in the web browser, especially when clicked near the bottom of a page with scroll bars. The workaround is to use scrollbars to move the node to the middle of the visible area and then right-click.

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Name Services

Your name services must be consistent between the server and the remote browser.  If the management station name (automatically defined in $OV_DB/openview/ovwdb/ovserver) does not resolve from the browser system correctly as the management station's IP address, the Dynamic View applet will not load.  This misconfiguration will also manifest as no images displayed in the index page (http://<MACHINENAME>:7510/topology/).

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Help on Active Tables

Dialogs launched from active tables contain a "Help" button that is not functional. General help on active tables is available here:
http://<machine>:3443/OvCgi/OvWebHelp.exe?Context=cxttsk&Content=cnttsk&Scope=scptsk&Topic=UsingTables
The ":3443" is only required on Unix servers and may be removed for Windows servers.  This information covers most active table features in the context of direct access from a table, rather than through subordinate dialogs.

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Authentication and Authorization

If you configure secure access to a particular view, and then incorrectly enter the user name and password, you will not get a second chance.  You must restart your browser to regain access.

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Active Table and Rearranging Columns

If you rearrange columns in an Active Table, you will be unable to launch from a selected row to another view.

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Node Details

There are two ways to get to Node Details, either double click on the node (or Active Table entry), or to select and pull down either the right click menu or View:Details.

With Overlapping Address Domain nodes, only the double click method works, the other will return a failure.

With nodes which were filtered out during Extended Topology discovery, only the menus will work, double click will return a failure.

Workaround:  If the View:Details menu fails, try double click, if double click fails, use View:Details.

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Dynamic Tables Sorting

After clicking on a table header column in a Dynamic Table to sort, you cannot click again to reverse sort.

Workaround:  Right click on the column heading and then pick Ascending or Descending to sort.

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Known Problems with Web Browsers

Web Interface

Ensure that you have the latest browser.  You must also have the Java Plug-in installed.  See Supported Configurations for more information on which browsers are supported and how to install the JPI.

Dynamic Views

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JPI 1.4.1 and Entity Expansion

JPI 1.4.1_03 (and greater) have a system property to limit the number of entity expansions in an XML document.  Unfortunately, the system property is by default not readable.  Therefore, an attempt to access this property fails, causing any expansion to fail.

The workaround for this problem is to add the following two lines to the section marked "grant" in the file "JRE_PATH/lib/security/java.policy" (where JRE_PATH is the path to the 1.4.1_03 JRE, typically C:\Program Files\Java on Windows and /opt/java on Unix systems).

permission java.util.PropertyPermission "entityExpansionLimit", "read";
permission java.util.PropertyPermission "disallowDoctypeDecl", "read";

All browsers will need to be closed, and the java cache may need to be cleared.

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Web Interface - HP OpenView Launcher

Can't get the Java based web Launcher (ovlaunch.exe URL) to come up

Do Not Close Launcher Window

Do NOT close the Launcher window, itself, when launching applications. Some applications use the frames within the Launcher window for executing web scripts. If the Launcher window is closed, it will cause the application that was launched from the window to close. This is particularly true when launching the HP OpenView Network Presenter. The Launcher window may be iconified to remove its presence instead of being closed.

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Web Interface - Network Presenter

Network Presenter with JPI 1.4.1 on Windows browsers does not repaint the panner window correctly.

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Web Interface - SNMP MIB Browser

On Windows XP, the system must be rebooted after initial installation of NNM for the Web SNMP MIB browser to work. This reboot allows IIS to reconfigure permissions properly. You may see the following text: "The specified CGI application misbehaved by not returning a complete set of HTTP headers..."

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Web Interface - Report Configuration/Report Presenter

If you schedule PingResponseTime and PingRetries reports, the reports are created, but will not begin collecting data until you complete one of two additional steps: either run xnmpolling -event, or do the following:

    ovstop netmon
    ovstart netmon
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Web Interface - SNMP Data Presenter

If using a proxy server, and the DNS server running on the proxy server cannot resolve an NNM data presenter hostname, the graphic lines for the tree structure cannot be located, and will appear as generic icon symbols. If this happens, disable use of the proxy server, clear the browser caches, and reload the page. If the problem persists, modify the http configuration file on the http server to provide the fully qualified name of the http server:

http server running on UNIX systems:

The configuration file is /opt/OV/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, and the entry to be modified is the ServerName entry. After saving the new configuration, you must restart the http server. This is accomplished with ovstop followed by ovstart.

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Web Interface - Correlation Composer GUI

If multiple users start the Composer GUI, or a user starts multiple Composer GUIs from the ECS CMG Composer 'Modify' button, and changes are made to the Correlators, only the last 'Save' will be preserved. The other user changes will be lost.

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Web Interface - ovweb

ovweb is a utility program which is used to start a preferred web browser and launch a specified URL. 

Now, with NNM 7.0, you only need to escape these special characters if you're running from the command line and it's required by your shell. You don't need to escape them an additional time for ovweb itself. For example:

ovweb "http://somewhere.com?foo=1&bar=2"

or

ovweb http://somewhere.com?foo=1\&bar=2

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Data Warehouse

When using databases other than the embedded database, the user needs to manually instantiate the data warehouse schemas using ovdwconfig.ovpl before using the data warehouse.

Using Oracle:

All export tools are enabled for ODBC.  To use Oracle, sql*net must be installed and configured.  A default datasource has been configured in the /etc/opt/OV/share/conf/analysis/system_odbc.ini file, OVoracle.  To switch over, change the "ServerName" parameter in that file to your server as defined in tnsnames.ora.
Then run:

To configure $ORACLE_HOME for use by the NNM Data Warehouse tools, you can use the "env" parameter on ovdwconfig.ovpl to place the value of ORACLE_HOME in the ovdwenvs.conf file. For example:

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Oracle SID may be misconfigured on HP-UX, Solaris, and Linux systems

On HP-UX, Solaris, and Linux systems, the file listener.ora may be misconfigured to have the Oracle SID set to "openview" even if the Oracle SID is not "openview". Rerunning ovdbsetupo3.sh will report this as an error if  $ORACLE_SID is not "openview". To correct this, edit listener.ora to the name to be the value of $ORACLE_SID.

The listener.ora and tnsnames.ora files can be located at:

HPUX 11.X: /etc/listener.ora
SOLARIS 2.X: /var/opt/oracle/listener.ora
LINUX 2.X:$ORACLE_HOME/network/admin

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Using ovbackup and the NNM Data Warehouse

If you are using ovbackup.ovpl and are using the NNM Data Warehouse, when the ovbackup.ovpl command is executed, it will also instruct the Embedded Database server to initiate the online backup. In order to allow a roll-forward recovery the default backup schedule must be deactivated. The process for doing this is:

  1. copy the $OV_DB/analysis/default/solid.ini file to $OV_DB/analysis/default/solid.ini.old file.
  2. Edit the $OV_DB/analysis/default/solid.ini file.
  3. Comment out the "At=<time> backup" entry, by inserting a ";" at the beginning of the line. An example would be:
    ;At=01:00 backup
  4. Save the $OV_DB/analysis/default/solid.ini file.

The embedded database will now be backed up only when the ovbackup.ovpl command is run. If use of ovbackup.ovpl is stopped at a future this, the default backup should be reinstated by copying the $OV_DB/analysis/default/solid.ini.old back to $OV_DB/analysis/default/solid.ini.

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Remote Consoles

For Japanese Windows 2000/XP Remote Consoles connecting to HP-UX or Solaris or Linux Management Stations, the 3rd party NT NFS product must be able to resolve the Japanese_Japan.932 symbolic links in the registration, symbols, and conf subdirectories. If the ovw menus and symbols on the Remote Console are in English, this means that the symbolic links are not working correctly. For the third party NFS product Disk Access, you need to enable symbolic links from the Disk Access applet in the Control Panel, not from the Administrator Utility.   The default for Disk Access is to not enable symbolic links.

Remote consoles are not tested against Samba servers for Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1.

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Internationalization (I18N)

This section documents defects in all parts of the product which only occur in non-English (LANG="C", browser language = "en") environments.

Unsupported: Do not mix languages on client and server for CGI-based views.

You cannot combine an NNM application that supports one language with a server that supports a different language. The following NNM views either will not work, or will display in the server's language:

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Supported Locale Names

The following are the locale names supported by NNM for Linux:

Hence, the $LANG variable should be set to these names in order to run NNM in Traditional Chinese or Korean locales. Other possible $LANG settings are not supported for Korean and Traditional Chinese.

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Accessing Web UI using Traditional Chinese or Korean browser (Netscape or Mozilla)

If any of the Web UIs is accessed from a Traditional Chinese or Korean browser, then the date/time and the Traditional Chinese or Korean character names may appear as square boxes.

Workaround

To work around this problem, complete the following steps:

  1. Close all instances of the browser.
  2. cd <Java Plugin install directory/lib>

  3. Eg: cd /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_01/lib
  4. Locate the following file:

  5. For Traditional Chinese: font.properties.zh_TW.Redhat8.0
    For Korean: font.properties.ko.Redhat8.0
  6. Create new files by copying the above mentioned files as follows:

  7. For Traditional Chinese: cp font.properties.zh_TW.Redhat8.0 font.properties.zh_TW.Redhat
    For Korean: cp font.properties.ko.Redhat8.0 font.properties.ko.Redhat
  8. Edit the font.properties<.Language>.Redhat file.

  9. The file will have font specification entries of the form:
    "-b&h-luxi serif-bold-i-normal--*-%d-*-*-p-*-iso8859-1"
    Ensure that these fonts are available on your system.
  10. Start the browser.

The above steps will enable the correct language-specific fonts to be displayed in the Web Interfaces. However, the following problem may still remain:
When network presenter is launched and any symbol with Traditional Chinese/Korean name is selected and right clicked, an incorrect symbol name appears in the popup window.

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Symbols with Traditional Chinese/Korean Names

The text boxes of the NNM GUIs, which allow users to enter symbol/map names, will show wrong characters when Traditional Chinese/Korean characters are given as input for symbol/map names. However, normal operations can be performed on these symbols.

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Running OVW in Traditional Chinese/Korean Locales

When a symbol is selected in ovw, running in T.chinese or Korean locales, and right clicked, the screen may blink. If the right click causes the screen to blink, then a drag operation needs to be performed on any symbol in the submap, to stop the blink. However, this symptom may be seen only once, whenever the X-server is restarted.

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Data Warehouse

There are a number of fields in the Data Warehouse that contain localized data. These fields are:

As a result of the localized data in the nnm_event_cat table, the data in the "Alarm Category" column of the Alarms By Category report will be localized. In addition, the data in the "category" column of the "Alarms By Severity" detail report will be localized. As a result of the localized data in the nnm_event_sev table, the data in the "Alarm Severity" column of the Alarms By Severity report will be localized. In addition, the data in the "Severity" column of the "Alarms By Category" detail report will be localized. As a result of the localized data in the nnm_event_detail table, certain text in the message fields of both the Alarms By Severity and the Alarms By Category will be localized.

The "high_time" and "low_time" fields from the nnm_event_thresh table are not used in any of the reports provided with NNM. These fields are localized because they are populated from a localized version of the trapd.conf file by ovdwevent. The version of trapd.conf that is used as a data source is determined by the local set when ovdwevent is run.

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Printing with Web-based Alarm Browser

The web-based alarm browser does its printing through ovalarmsrv.  The printer connected to the machine running ovalarmsrv must support multi-byte characters in order to print Japanese output.  There is no way to pass arguments to the printer, so the printer must have something similar to a '-japanese' option enabled by default to the lp command.

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Printing Submaps on Unix with ovw

If you need to pass options to your printer so that it will print in landscape and Japanese, you can set the environment variable $OVwLpOpts before running ovw, so that the time string at the bottom of the printed output will print properly.  For example, you can set:

    export OVwLpOpts="-olandscape -ojapanese"
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Do Not Intermix Locales with the Topology/Map Databases

When NNM is first installed, the topology/map databases will contain labels in that locale.  Submap names are created in this locale, and should be accessed through that same locale.

You must plan which language will be used for NNM. Once a locale is chosen, it is very hard to change it. This is because NNM does not support mixed locale string in the topology and map databases. Once it is decided which locale is to be used, perform the following steps.

  1. Set $LANG to the desired locale. (e.g. LANG=ja_JP.eucjp; export LANG)
  2. Install NNM with exported LANG environment
  3. Stop OV processes (ovstop)
  4. Re-start OV process with desired LANG environment (ovstart)
  5. Setup Bootup scripts. Edit /sbin/init.d/ov500 as follows (this example uses SJIS on HP-UX):
        'start')
            if .........
            case `uname` in
             ...........
            HP-UX)
                ECHO_CMD=$ECHO_CMD_HP
                OVHOME=/opt/OV
                PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/etc:$PATH
                export PATH LANG=ja_JP.eucjp # Add following 2 lines
                export LANG                               # if want to set LANG=SJIS
                ;; 
  6. Set the default WEB locale if you want to change locale from default:
    # ovchange_locale_mapping [-sjis | -euc]
    (Default locale)
    HP-UX ja_JP.SJIS
    Solaris ja

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The "More Information" Window

The "More Information" window launched from OVW-> Help -> About HP OpenView ->More Info shows date/time as garbage in Traditional Chinese/Korean.

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Tools

This section documents all the known problems in the tools that NNM includes.

Snmpget and snmpset Do Not Work the Same Way as in HPUX/Solaris/Windows

NNM ships snmpget, snmpset, snmpwalk, snmptrap commands. But, these commands are also being shipped by the ucd-snmp package in Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1. By default, the ucd-snmp command utils are placed under /usr/bin whereas NNM-supplied commands are installed under /opt/OV/bin. Hence, when the user executes snmpget, first the ucd-snmp supplied snmpget command is executed, which does not behave the same way as the NNM-supplied commands.

To solve this problem, add /opt/OV/bin to path, in such a way that /opt/OV/bin is first in the path before /usr/bin.

Example:
For ksh users:
$ export PATH=/opt/OV/bin:$PATH
For csh users:
$ setenv PATH /opt/OV/bin:$PATH

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hpuxagt Not Available on Linux

The emanate SNMP agent shipped along with the NNM does not contain hpuxagt, and this is not ported for Linux.

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Fault->Network Connectivity->Locate via:SNMP not Working for Linux Nodes

Fault->Networking Connectivity->Locate via:Snmp needs certain features supported by the hpux agent, which is part of Emanate Suite of snmp agents. But, hpuxagt is not ported on to Linux. This feature will not work against Linux nodes, but this feature should work against non-linux nodes running hpuxagt supplied as part of HP's Emanage Agent suite.

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ovperms.ovpl

The ovperms.ovpl script is not available on Linux.

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Snmp Agent Start Script is Called ovsnmpd

The script used to start the snmp agents and the sub agent is renamed as ovsnmpd and installed under /usr/sbin.

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Snmpdm Log File

On other platforms, Snmpd.log is created in /var/adm whereas on Linux, it is created under /etc/SnmpAgent.d.

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Ovstop Does Not Kill All the Instances of OVAS

When ovstop is executed, it may not kill all the instances of ovas. Because of this, when ovstart is executed after ovstop, ovas will not start successfully.

To work around this problem, kill all the instances of ovas before doing ovstart.

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Conflicting Man Pages for snmp Commands

NNM ships man pages fpr snmpget, snmpset, snmpwalk, snmptrap commands. But, these commands are also being shipped by the ucd-snmp man package in Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1. By default, the ucd-snmp command man pages are installed under /usr/share/man/man1 whereas NNM-supplied man pages are installed under /opt/OV/man. Hence, when the user executes 'man snmpget', since the ucd-snmp supplied man page path comes before the NNM's installed man path, the user cannot see the man page shipped by NNM.

To work around this problem, add /opt/OV/man to MANPATH in such a way that /opt/OV/bin is first in the search path before /usr/bin.

Example:
For ksh users:
$ export MANPATH=/opt/OV/bin:$MANPATH
For csh users:
$ setenv MANPATH /opt/OV/bin:$MANPATH

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Invalid Links in the Views sub-menu of Actions menu in Alarm browser

In the Alarm browser the Views sub-menu in the Actions menu has the following invalid links

HSRP View
IPv6
VLAN

Online Help and Man Pages

This section documents all the known problems in the online help system that NNM includes.

Man Pages for certain deamons and commands are not found

Man pages for daemons and certain commands are placed under /opt/OV/man/man1m for NNM and /opt/OV/man/man1m.Z for ecs tools. To view the man page for these commands the man section should be specified in the command line (e.g. man 1m netmon, man 1m.Z ecsmgr).

Alternatively, 1m and 1m.Z may be added to the MANSECT variable in the /etc/man.config file (e.g. MANSECT 1:8:2:3:4:5:6:7:9:tcl:n:l:p:o:1m:1m.Z). This enables man to search the additional directories man1m and man1m.Z without command line parameters.

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Size of the Online Help Window

The size of the online help windows of NNM when using GNOME as the desktop is inconsistent. When the right scroll bar is not visible, the arrow keys or the PgUp/PgDwn keys should be used for scrolling.

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Content of Online Help

The "Using Help" option in ovw Help menu brings up a window titled "HP OpenView Windows Help". This window contains information about Using the online help itself. The displayed content may contain information specific to CDE (Common Desktop Environment). All the information specific to CDE will hold good only if CDE is being used as the Desktop Environment. It will not hold good for GNOME and KDE.

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Warning message on Console

While launching any of the online help windows, the console may show an error as follows:

"Warning: Representation size 2 must match superclass's to override columns"

This warning may be ignored.

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Troubleshooting

TIP: Look in the following directories for error log files and trace output. Look for the keyword "ERROR":

Windows 2000/XP:
\<installdir>\log\*.* and \<installdir>\tmp\*.*
UNIX and Linux:
$OV_SHARE_LOG, $OV_PRIV_LOG, and $OV_TMP

Troubleshooting Installation

See Managing Your Network with NNM for information about starting with a well-configured network for best results. If during installation NNM complains that your networking appears to be misconfigured, try the following. From a command prompt of the management system type:

    /sbin/ifconfig
This will display your Linux TCP/IP config, including your hostname. Then type:
    nslookup <YOUR_IP_ADDRESS>
where <YOUR_IP_ADDRESS> is the address reported by ipconfig. If the hostnames reported by ipconfig and nslookup don't match, then NNM won't work. If either command fails to give you a hostname, then DNS is likely misconfigured or not available. Verify that the result of this nslookup matches the result of 'ovw -server'.

Troubleshooting Discovery

NNM will automatically start up and begin discovering and displaying your network within five minutes of installation. However, if your discovery is not working (such as an empty internet icon on the top level map) or you would like to validate your installation, see Chapter 5 in Managing Your Network with NNM for information about troubleshooting the Discovery process. The following may help you isolate any problems:

If NNM fails to discover all the nodes you expect to find in your local network, individually ping first your local node and then the missing nodes to verify connectivity (using the Fault:Ping" menu item). Validate that your node "knows" about these by selecting your management station icon and selecting the Configuration:Network Configuration->ARP Cache menu item. You should then see these new nodes in the ARP cache. Select your management station and select the Fault:Network Connectivity->Poll Node menu item to have the netmon process query your node again. The new nodes should then be added to the map.

Manually Seeding Discovery

If NNM fails to discover any nodes, you can manually seed discovery through the user interface or command line. See Chapter 5 of Managing Your Network with NNM and the netmon reference page in NNM's online help (or the Linux manpage) for details.

This is done by adding a node at the internet level which supports SNMP.  Even if this node is not really a gateway, NNM will properly discover the device, create the necessary networks, and place it in the appropriate network.  Verify the node supports SNMP by running:

    rnetstat -I <nodename>
To manually add this node through NNM's user interface:
  1. Open NNM's user interface.
  2. Go to the top level submap and select the internet icon.  Double click on it to get to the internet submap
  3. Pick Edit:Add Object  Select 'connectors' and 'gateway'
  4. Give the name of the gateway.  Double click on 'ipmap'
  5. Enter in the correct submap (important!) and the node name.  Hit [Verify] and [OK]

To manually add this node through a command line (you must know the correct subnet mask) run:

    echo <IPADDR> <NODENAME> | loadhosts -V -v -m <SUBNETMASK>

where <IPADDR> is the IP address of the node to add, <NODENAME> is the name of the node, and <SUBNETMASK> is the subnet mask for the network.  An example is:

    echo 192.18.1.1 myrouter | loadhosts -V -v -m 255.255.255.0

You can also manually seed discovery by using a seedfile.

After seeding discovery, you should see the map start displaying nodes based upon the information received from the node which supports SNMP, or see a list of nodes when running the ovtopodump command.

Troubleshooting Data Warehouse

Make sure the database is executing by running "ovstatus ovdbcheck".

You can verify that data exists in your data warehouse by using the ovdwquery command, such as:

You can use the ovdbdebug command to test whether your database is functional.

See Reporting and Data Analysis with NNM for more information.

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