Foglight Agent Manager 5.9.7 - Foglight Agent Manager Guide

About supported remote monitoring protocols

The Agent Manager supports the SSH (secure shell) protocol for remote monitoring of hosts running Linux® and UNIX® operating systems. SSH is a protocol which encrypts all traffic between the client and the server, and supports a wide variety of secure authentication mechanisms. SSH is available for installation on all platforms supported for remote monitoring by Foglight.

The Agent Manager does not support the older Telnet protocol for remote monitoring. Telnet is an insecure protocol which does not encrypt traffic, and requires that the passwords used to authenticate collections are sent in the clear. For that reason, supporting Telnet as a remote monitoring protocol potentially exposes monitored systems to trivial network eavesdropping attacks, disclosing passwords to attackers.

While it is possible to create a closed network with strong security boundaries within which it is safe to run the Telnet protocol, this use case is not common, and it is impossible for the Agent Manager to determine if Telnet is safe to use before offering it as an option for connectivity. Further, the effort required on the part of the user to maintain such a secure environment is far less than that required to simply enable SSH connections on a host. For these reasons, the Agent Manager does not support Telnet as a remote monitoring protocol.

Configuring the Agent Manager to run as a daemon

As described in Installing the Agent Manager using the installer interface and Installing the Agent Manager from the command line , you can install an init.d-style script called quest-fglam in the init.d directory on your system. This script is called when the host on which the Agent Manager is installed starts or shuts down, allowing it to run as a daemon.

Even if you choose not to install the init.d script during the installation, or if you do not perform the installation as the root user, the installer generates scripts that can perform the necessary setup.

These scripts are fglam-init-script-installer.sh and fglam-init-script.sh, and they are located in the <fglam_home>/state/default/ directory.

The script fglam-init-script-installer.sh installs the script fglam-init-script.sh into your system’s init.d directory as quest-fglam. Your system’s init.d process then uses quest-fglam to run the Agent Manager as a daemon.

IMPORTANT: Any customizations that you make to the script fglam-init-script.sh are not supported by Quest Software Inc..

IMPORTANT: This script must be run as root.

To remove the init.d script, follow the instructions in To remove the init.d script used to run the Agent Manager as a daemon on UNIX®: .

Locating the init.d script

Depending on the operating system you are running, the init.d-style script quest-fglam is installed to a different location either by the Agent Manager installer or after you run the script fglam-init-script-installer.sh.

The locations of the installed init.d script (listed by operating system) are as follows:

NOTE: The location of the init.d script depends only on the type of operating system, not on the specific architecture. For example, the location is the same for HP-UX running on either PA‑RISC or Itanium, or for Oracle Solaris® running on either SPARC or x86.

Obtaining the Agent Manager daemon status

In addition to starting or stopping the Agent Manager process, the init.d script allows you to obtain the status of the daemon process when you run the script with the status option. When the status option is specified with the init.d script, the script returns one of the following status codes: