TCP/IP networking

Prior to installing IBM® Intelligent Operations Center, TCP/IP networking between the servers must be correctly configured.

If you are installing IBM Intelligent Operations Center for a high availability environment, you must use IPV4. High availability server clustering does not support IPV6.

All servers used by IBM Intelligent Operations Center must be configured with a short host name and a fully-qualified host name. The host names must resolve on each server to the correct IP address. Configuration can be done using a DNS server or by adding definitions to the /etc/hosts file.

The fully-qualified host name for each server must have at least three components. For example: myhost.mydomain.com where the top level domain is a standard Internet top-level domain.

Important: Short host names and fully-qualified host names must be specified in the correct case. For example, MyCompany.MyDomain.com cannot be specified as mycompany.mydomain.com.

IPv6 networking is supported by IBM Intelligent Operations Center, but IPv4 must be installed and configured as well. IPv4 addresses do not need to be assigned to the servers, but the IPv4 loopback address (127.0.0.1) must be enabled and the localhost host name must resolve to 127.0.0.1.

Configuration changes are shown in Table 1. These are guidelines for setting up TCP/IP networking on the IBM Intelligent Operations Center installation server and target servers by editing the Linux network configuration files. The configuration notes in Table 1 are only guidelines. Any network setup conforming to the requirements described previously should work.

Table 1. TCP/IP configuration guidelines
File Notes®
/etc/hosts The hosts file resolves TCP/IP names to IP addresses. If the configuration does not have a DNS server, all servers and their IP addresses, short host names, and fully-qualified names must be defined in this file. Local loopback addresses and host names are also defined in this file.

If a DNS server is being used, hosts which are resolved by the DNS do not need to be included in this file.

Important: When using IPv4, the local loopback address 127.0.0.1 must be mapped to the localhost and localhost.localdomain host names.

The following is a sample /etc/hosts file using IPv4 addresses.

# local loopback definitions -- do not remove 
# or alter these!
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
# use the following if IPv6 is enabled in your 
# network definitions
::1 localhost6.localdomain localhost6

# target runtime servers for the standard topology
192.168.0.210 iocweb.ioc16.com iocweb
192.168.0.211 iocapp.ioc16.com 1ocapp
192.168.0.212 iocdb.ioc16.com iocdb
192.168.0.213 iocana.ioc16.com iocana 

# target runtime servers for the high availability
topology
192.168.0.210 iocweb1.ioc16.com iocweb1
192.168.0.211 iocweb2.ioc16.com iocweb2
192.168.0.212 iocapp1.ioc16.com iocapp1
192.168.0.213 iocapp2.ioc16.com iocapp2
192.168.0.214 iocdb1.ioc16.com iocdb1
192.168.0.215 iocdb2.ioc16.com iocdb2
192.168.0.216 iocana1.ioc16.com iocana1
192.168.0.217 iocana2.ioc16.com iocana2

Use IPv6 address notation to assign IPv6 static addresses .

Both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses can be defined on the same server.
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-adapter_name The ifcfg-adapter_name file defines the basic network settings for the specified network adapter. The Linux assigned name for the network adapter is specified by adapter_name. The typical value for adapter_name is eth0 but might be different for your environment.
For IPv4 networking the following parameters should be defined.
IPADDR
Specify the IPv4 IP address of the server being configured.
NETMASK
Specify the IPv4 network mask of the server being configured.
GATEWAY
Specify the IPv4 default network IP address of the server being configured.
BOOTPROTO
If static IP addressing is being used, specify none.
NM_CONTROLLED
Specify no to disable the Network Management service from modifying the ifcfg-adapter_name file.
ONBOOT
Specify yes to start the adapter automatically.
IPV6INIT
Specify yes if the adapter is to use IPv6 networking.
IPV6ADDR
Specify the server IPv6 IP address if IPV6INIT=yes is specified.
IPV6_DEFAULTGW
Specify the server IPv6 default network gateway IP address if IPV6INIT=yes is specified.
/etc/sysconfig/network The network file specifies general networking parameters.
For IPv4 networking the following parameters should be defined:
NETWORKING
Specify yes to enable IPv4 networking.
NETWORKING_IPV6
Specify yes if IPv6 networking is also desired.
HOSTNAME
Specify the server short host name.

Hostname configuration changes made by editing the /etc/sysconfig/network file will not take affect until the server is restarted. If a restart isn’t desired, change the hostname for the current shell session by running the hostname new_host_name command. For example, to change the hostname of the server to iocweb, run the hostname iocweb command.
/etc/resolv.conf The resolv.conf file is used to define DNS servers for the network and a default search domain. If DNS servers are not being used, this file should be empty.
If a DNS server is used, the resolv.conf should contain the following lines:
search domain_name
nameserver first_DNS_server
nameserver second_DNS_server
For example: 
search yourcompany.com 
nameserver 10.75.20.10 
nameserver 10.75.20.11

The search value specifies the default search domain. The first nameserver value is the IP address of the DNS server. A second nameserver value can be used to specify a secondary DNS server. The second nameserver specification is optional.
When correctly configured, each server must successfully pass the following tests:
  1. The hostname -s command returns the defined short host name for the server.
  2. The hostname -f command returns the fully qualified domain and host name for the server.
  3. The hostname -d command returns the domain name of the server.
  4. The results of a ping command, or ping6 command for IPV6 environments, with the short host name for each server indicates that the server is accessible.
  5. The results of a ping command, or ping6 command for IPV6 environments, with the fully-qualified name for each server indicates that the server is accessible.