NMIS 8.5.2G E-mail Notifications Using Exchange As Relay

In the past few weeks, I started working with NMIS. The application does a great job monitoring all sorts of devices. I decided to use the free version, so support is mainly based on whatever is found on the web or from NMIS’ email group.

It took me a few tries to enable email relay notifications in NMIS, and the few blogs that I found only touched on enabling email notifications using NMIS itself to deliver emails. In my case, I wanted to use my Exchange 2010 server to be the one responsible for delivering emails on behalf of NMIS.

Here’s what you’ll need:

1. A working NMIS environment
1. I downloaded the NMIS appliance and got the application to work in an hour.
2. A working installation of a mail daemon in the linux box where NMIS is running
1. For my environment I used sendmail, so most of these steps are related to sendmail.
3. A working installation of Exchange server

Prepare Sendmail To Relay

1. Logon to the linux server where NMIS is running from
2. Go to /etc/mail directory
3. run vi sendmail.cf
1. You can use any file editor, I just prefer vi
4. If using vi type: /DSsmtp
1. /  does a search for string DSsmtp
5. Once that line is found, then you’ll want to change it to:  DSsmtp.YourDomain.com
6. Save the file and reload sendmail services

Prepare Exchange Server To Accept Relay

1. Logon to your hub Exchange server
2. Follow the next screenshot

Configure Emails, Notifications and Escalations in NMIS

It took me quite a bit of time to understand how notifications and escalations work in NMIS; there are many blogs that do a decent job explaining this topic, so I’m not going to go into details.

First, you have to setup Contacts in NMIS. NMIS creates some default contacts, so you can use one of these or create your own.

Note: Take a look at the field Contact, since I chose one of the default contacts created by NMIS, I’m using Contact1

Second, create your email notifications and escalations to send notifications to your contact.

Once again, I’m using a default notification and escalation. Notice that I’m using the same contact name, Contact1, to send notifications.

There is a catch though. This will send email  for all Level 1 and Level 4 notifications for ALL devices that you have added to NMIS. Prepare yourself for all the spam!

Let this run for a few days, so you learn what each level of notification is. Basically, Level 0 is severity major, Level 1 is a severity warning; this is based on the email notifications I gathered in a week of spamming. I use this to create filtered notifications, read along.

When you add devices to NMIS, hopefully you created groups and added these devices to different groups. Also, when you add devices to NMIS, you have to indicate what type of device is, and these fields will allow you to filter your notifications based on groups, type, etc. Here’s an example.

In this example, I’m receiving text message notifications for routers in my DataCenter group that generate Level 0 and Level 1 events.

Deploy AutoDesk Building Design Suite Premium 2015 with SCCM 2012

In this post, I’m going to go over the deployment of AutoDesk Building Design Suite Premium 2015 using SCCM 2012.

1. You’re going to use AutoDesk BDSP setup wizard to create the ‘image’ folder using AutoCAD’s own image building process. This process will allow you to perform a standard, or custom, installation of AutoDesk’s applications and features, so I’m not going into details about this. At the end of this process, AutoDesk’s wizard will create a SMS_SCCM scripts folder which contains text files that will allow you to install and un-install BDSP; we’re going to use these text files for the deployment.
2. The SCCM client imposes a folder size on C:\Windows\ccmcache folder, so we’re going to have to use another script to call the installation process scripts created in step 1.

INSTALL.BAT (calls the script created by BDSP in step 1)

@ECHO OFF

REM MAP NETWORK SHARE DRIVE

REM THIS COMMAND ASSUMES THAT THE USER HAS ACCESS TO THIS SHARE

REM ALL USERS SHOULD HAVE READ ACCESS TO THE SHARE

NET USE X: “\\ServerName\LocationOfBDSPfiles” /user:SomeUser SomePassword

REM CHANGE DRIVES

X:

REM INSTALL AUTODESK BUILDING DESIGN SUITE STANDARD 2015

.\Img\Setup.exe /W /q /I Img\AutoDesk BDS Premium 2015.ini /language en-us

REM REMOVE DESKTOP SHORTCUTS

DEL /Q “C:\Users\Public\Desktop\3ds Max Design 2015.lnk”

DEL /Q “C:\Users\Public\Desktop\AutoCAD*.lnk”

DEL /Q “C:\Users\Public\Desktop\Autodesk*.lnk”

DEL /Q “C:\Users\Public\Desktop\Navisworks Simulate 2015.lnk”

DEL /Q “C:\Users\Public\Desktop\Raster Design 2015*.lnk”

DEL /Q “C:\Users\Public\Desktop\Revit 2015.lnk”

REM CHANGE BACK TO C: DRIVE

C:

REM REMOVE NETWORK SHARE DRIVE

NET USE X: /DEL

I use the previous script in SCCM to create the deployment package.

Here’s what I use for a Detection Method, basically I’m looking for BDSP executable files on the target computer.

This process works well for my environment.

Make a note that this installation may take hours (2-4)…