Compaq Insight Manager and Citrix MetaFrame

Our company uses only Compaq servers, and our internal specification calls for Compaq Insight Manager on all machines so that we can monitor them from our network operations center. We're setting up a new Citrix MetaFrame server farm to deploy an accounting package worldwide. Up time is very important. What issues do we face?

You face a few Insight Manager issues. First, Compaq Insight Manager, a Windows-based console application with monitoring and alerting capabilities for the critical systems in your distributed enterprise, consists of two parts:

You can install both components on a Windows NT 4.0, Terminal Server Edition (TSE) server, but you don't need to install Insight Manager on TSE because you can remotely monitor the Compaq Insight Manager Agent data from another server that's running the Insight Manager software.

To prepare for the install, install SNMP and make sure that you set it for read/write and not read/create. Next, install the latest service pack, the most recent Compaq Support Software Diskettes (SSDs), and hotfixes. Check the Services tab under Network Properties to verify again that SNMP is read/write. Before Service Pack 5 (SP5), SNMP required hotfix Q196270. Microsoft included the hotfix in SP5.

The Insight Manager setup program copies the file mgmtapi.dll to the %systemroot%system32 directory. If you install SP4 or later on MetaFrame, the service pack's mgmtapi.dll will overwrite Insight Manager's mgmtapi.dll. Thereafter, Insight Manager will refuse to start and will display the error message, "Error loading mgmtapi.dll." The only way to fix this is to reinstall Insight Manager. Be sure to install all service packs and hotfixes before you install Compaq Insight Manager.

Next, you have to prepare the application for multiuser use. When users other than the installer of Insight Manager attempt to run cim.exe, they receive the error message, "Invalid Files—You Must Reinstall" because the file cim20.ini doesn't copy into each user's home directory. To resolve this problem, you can copy the file to each user or set the application compatibility bit for this application to accept %systemroot% as the Windows directory instead of the user directories. To do this,

When you install Compaq Insight Manager, one component you might want to leave out is the Patrol Agent, a free add on that ships with the Insight package. Patrol Agent performs a periodic survey of the system that can tie up the CPU.

You can download the most recent Compaq Insight Manager products from Compaq's Web site.