Wednesday 2 July 2014

Installing ASR

Auto Service Request (ASR) is a secure, scalable, customer-installable software feature of Oracle Premier Support for Systems and Oracle/Sun Limited Warranty support that provides auto-case generation when specific hardware faults occur. ASR is designed to enable faster problem resolution by eliminating the need to initiate contact with Oracle for hardware failures, reducing both the number of phone calls needed and overall phone time required. ASR also simplifies support operations by utilizing electronic diagnostic data. If your qualified system is under warranty or covered by a service plan, you are entitled to ASR at no charge.
 I've been using ASR on my SUN storage for years. And it works brilliantly. Great to come into work in the morning and receive emails that a disk failed and also that a replacement disk is on its way. That ASR worked a little different - the new implementation needs an ASR server installed. Here are the steps I followed to install ASR:
  1. Created a zone for ASR - I put everything in zones. Bitches love zones. I had a warm standby machine in my DMZ so I used that.
  2. Download the software logging into support.oracle.com and searching for Oracle Document : 1185493.1. To install ASR, you need to install OASM (Oracle Automated Service Manager) first. This doc will give you the link to both ASR and OASM.
  3. Install OASM
    • unzip Oracle_OASM_150_SOLARIS64.zip
    • pkgadd -d SUNWsasm-1.5.0-20130731121217.pkg
    • (The next two steps I did because of errors messages during the install so maybe do them before the install.)
    • pkg install SUNWcar SUNWkvm
    • pkg install pkg:/system/management/service-tag@1.1.5-0.175.1.0.0.23.0
  4. Install ASR
    • unzip Oracle_ASR_481_SOLARIS64.zip
    • pkgadd -d SUNWswasr-4.8.1-20140415212449.pkg
    • export PATH=$PATH:/opt/SUNWswasr/bin:/opt/SUNWsasm/bin
    • put line above in .profile
    • Run: asr
    • asr> register
    • Options are all all easy - just make sure your machine can get to transport.oracle.com
  5. Make sure you other machines can talk to ASR server
    1. First way of doing this:
      • asr> enable_http_receiver -p 8234
    2. Second way of doing this:
      • Edit /var/opt/SUNWsasm/configuration/config.ini
        jetty.enable=true
        jetty.host=<ipaddress> (Don't use "localhost")
        jetty.http.port=8234
      • Restart sasm: svcadm restart sasm
  6. Edit /var/opt/SUNWsasm/configuration/config.ini and set java.exec property to point to your java binary. And then restart sasm with svcadm restart sasm.
  7. Check that it all works with:
    • asr> show_http_receiver
  8. To connect Solaris 11 machines to your new ASR server, run:
    • asradm register -e http://<ip_of_your_server>:8234/asr
And that's it! Next you'll want to log into support.oracle.com and make sure that all your servers' details are correct and what not.