Installing call home

The call home feature collects files, logs, traces, and details of certain system health events from different nodes and services. These details are shared with the IBM® support center for monitoring and problem determination.

Prerequisites for installing call home

The following criteria must be met to use the call home functionality on your GPFS™ cluster:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x, and SLES 12 nodes are supported.
  • Intel x86_64 and PowerPC® LE and BE are supported.
  • At least one call home group must be defined.
  • GPFS CCR (Clustered Configuration Repository) must be enabled.
  • The call home node must be able to access the following IP addresses and ports. In the configurations with a proxy, these IP addresses and ports should be accessible over the proxy connection.
    • Host name: esupport.ibm.com
    • IP address: 129.42.56.189, 129.42.60.189, 129.42.52.189
    • Port number: 443
    The recommendation is to open 129.42.0.0/18.
  • The call home node needs to have at least 1 GB free space under the data package directory in the dataStructureDump directory. It is preferable to have 2 - 3 GB of free space. The current dataStructureDump directory can be determined using the following command: 
    mmdiag --config | grep "dataStructureDump "
    and is tmp/mmfs by default. You can change the default value of the dataStructureDump directory using the mmchconfig command.

    The call home node needs to have 1 GB free space under the data package directory (2 - 3 GB preferred).

  • There must not be multiple nodes with the same short host name within the GPFS cluster.
  • Only GPFS clusters where scp is configured as the file transfer method are supported. The file transfer method that is currently configured can be detected by running the mmlscluster | grep "Remote file copy" command:
    [root@g4240-51 ~]# mmlscluster | grep "Remote file copy"
Remote file copy command: /usr/bin/scp
    Note: Call home is not supported in a sudo wrapper environment.

Steps for installing call home

The installation toolkit handles installing and upgrading the call home RPMs, but does not configure or enable the call home feature.

For information on configuring call home manually, see Monitoring the IBM Spectrum Scale system by using call home.

Note: You must install the packages on all the nodes from which you want to gather data, and all the nodes where you want to upload data. The GPFS cluster nodes that are unsupported, unconfigured, or do not have call home installed, do not influence the call home capabilities.
  1. Install the call home RPMs in the following order:
    Important: If you are using Ubuntu, use the corresponding *.deb files.
    1. gpfs.java-4.2.3-0.x86_64.rpm
    2. gpfs.callhome-ecc-client-4.2.3-0.000.noarch.rpm
    3. gpfs.callhome-4.2.3-0
      1. For RHEL: gpfs.callhome-4.2.3-0.000.el7.noarch.rpm
      2. For SLES: gpfs.callhome-4.2.3-0.000.sles12.noarch.rpm
  2. Ensure that the following dependencies are resolved when you install call home:
    • Dependencies for gpfs.callhome-4.2 and later:
      • perl-List-MoreUtils
      • perl-Module-Runtime
      • perl-Try-Tiny
      • perl-Module-Implementation
      • perl-Params-Validate
      • perl-DateTime-Locale
      • perl-Sub-Install
      • perl-Params-Util
      • perl-Data-OptList
      • perl-Package-DeprecationManager
      • perl-Package-Stash-XS
      • perl-Package-Stash
      • perl-Class-Load
      • perl-Class-Singleton
      • perl-TimeDate
      • perl-DateTime
      • perl-DateTime-TimeZone
      • perl-Data-Dumper package
Parent topic: Installing and upgrading