Here are some notes from what I did when I connected a SUSE box through a gateway server to Operations Manager 2007 R2. During the discovery I found received two error messages. The first one was solved by selecting correct management server. By mistake I selected my root management server that are on the other side of a ISA server, so it could not copy the files to my SUSE box. When I selected my gateway server instead, that are on the same subnet as SUSE, there was no problem copy the files.

< ![CDATA[Executing command: rm -rf /tmp/scx-root; mkdir -m 755 /tmp/scx-root
Transferring file: E:\Program Files\System Center Operations Manager 2007\AgentManagement\UnixAgents\GetOSVersion.sh to location: /tmp/scx-root/
Verifying that file: GetOSVersion.sh was transferred properly
A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
]]>

The second error message was about Windows Remote Management (WinRM). You need to configure WinRM on the gateway server, unfortunately the error message doesn’t tell you that it should be run on the gateway server, but as it is the selected management server for the discovery, that is where you need to configure WinRM.

After that there was no problem discover the SUSE machine from a gateway server.

When I shutdown my gateway server I could see that the SUSE box was changed to a unknown state

I then changed primary management server for my SUSE box, under the Administrator workspace in the console. After a couple of minutes the SUSE box turned red (from unknown) and start alerting about certification problems.

The SCX-agent certificates are signed by a key on the management server that has discovered them, and that machine, in this case my gateway server DMZ01, is not a trusted root CA on my root management server, corp-R2. To verify that the SCX Agent on the remote system is running properly, try enumerating the SCX_Agent provider using the following command from the primary management server

winrm e http://schemas.microsoft.com/wbem/wscim/1/cim-schema/2/SCX_Agent?__cimnamespace=root/scx -r:https://.:1270 -u: -p:
-auth:basic -encoding:utf-8

gave

To solve this, you need to copy the SCX-Certificate from the gateway server, or the management server discovered the SUSE box, to your new primary management server. Import the certificate as a trusted root certification authorities. Once the certificate is in place you can run the WINrm e command again and you will get another result

Summary. The SUSE box can be discovered by your gateway server. The SUSE box can also do a manually failover between a gateway server and a management server, as long as the certificate is in place. Communication between management server and the Linux box use TCP port 1270 and always originates from the management server or gateway server. In some cases, such as when the WSMAN layer is not present on the Linux box or it has failed, the communication can occur over SSH TCP 22. SSH can be used for installing the WSMAN layer or performing diagnostics tasks. There will be no “heartbeat failure” for the SUSE box, at least I did not received that first five minutes. I did received alerts for the gateway server and some “logfile module error” but not a clear “heartbeat missing” alert for my SUSE box.