This article is by Paul Craddock, Sales Engineer at Stratodesk.

ControlUp provides real-time monitoring of physical, virtual, hyper-converged assets, just like a spreadsheet, allowing you to customize metrics that are important to you and with the introduction of firmware 3.2.760 in December, Stratodesk NoTouch OS supports ControlUp with the all the pre-requisites installed. The following will cover all the steps needed to make the solution work.

Before getting started, however, there are a number of things that need to be in place prior to connecting NoTouch devices. For example, ControlUp uses reverse DNS to connect to the devices, as well as a forward lookup zone. For this reason, it’s important that you also have a reverse lookup zone in place. Devices added to DNS normally create a PTR record which adds the device to the DNS Reverse Lookup Zone.

Use ControlUp with Stratodesk Software – Setting Up Reverse Lookup Zone

To check that Reverse DNS is correctly configured you can open a command prompt and use ‘nslookup’ to check everything is working correctly as shown below.

Enable SSH in NoTouch Center

Next, in NoTouch Center, we need to enable SSH, with the following settings enabled. The reason for this is that ControlUp will try to install the agent onto the endpoint even though it is already installed via SSH. ControlUp also uses SSH to connect to the endpoint and collect data.

If this is the first time you have enabled the SSH service, then you will need to reboot the device for the service to become active.

Setup the ‘notouchadm” User Account and Password

Next open Control Up, go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Credential Store’ and then ‘Add Credentials Set’ as we need to add the ‘notouchadm’ user account & password.

1. User: notouchadm (this is default username)
2. Password: Enter your NoTouch admin password
3. Domain: From the drop-down menu select ‘Local Computer’

Click OK to close the ‘Add New Credentials’ window and OK again to close the ‘Credential Store’ window.

Next, go to ‘Advanced’. In the pop-up window go to ‘Agent’. You need to select ‘Allow users to add machines that are running unsupported Linux flavours’ and then click OK.

Add the Linux Data Collector in ControlUp with Stratodesk Software

From the ‘Home’ screen we will now add the ‘Linux Data Collector’

1. Name: Give the data collector a unique name
2. Credentials: On the dropdown menu select ‘notouchadm’
3. Add: Click add to add new machines

In the example below I’m adding a single machine, but if you wish to add multiple devices then you can add these to a text file method instead.

1. Type the IP address of the device
2. Click scan. This may show a warning message that the ‘OS is not fully supported, but this is expected’
3. Add the selected devices.

Click OK, and then a warning message will appear, so just select yes which will return you to the main screen.

It will appear that the installation has failed. This is to be expected  as Notouch OS is Secure and will not allow items to be added to the file system and OS.  This error can be ignored as we have taken the steps to pre-load the required libraries.

If it doesn’t automatically update itself, simply right click the device and click ‘Connect’. All being well, the device will then appear green and connected. If in doubt, try rebooting the device.

Below is what you should see once everything is connected and you should have real-time visibility of the process running on the NoTouch devices.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this tech corner update from us at Stratodesk. Get started trying out Stratodesk software today by downloading your free trial!