Automate Robot rename or change of IP in DX UIM

Products

• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• DX Unified Infrastructure Management (Nimsoft / UIM)
• CA Unified Infrastructure Management SaaS (Nimsoft / UIM)
• Unified Infrastructure Management for Mainframe

Issue/Introduction

• Are there documented best practices for handling scenarios when a UIM Robot system changes hostname and/or IP?
• Is it possible for the DX UIM robot agent to automatically recognize a robot/server's new IP address (due to a scheduled IP address change) so that it remains active, without needing to manually update the robot.cfg file?

Environment

• DX UIM 23.4.*
• Any robto version

Cause

• Administration
• Automation
• Guidance
• Ip rotation

Resolution

There isn't any built in mechanism or out of the box method for a robot to be aware of a local IP rotation and automatically "fix itself" with a automatic update of the IP.

As the controller doesn't have the ability to detect such a change, when the IP address rotates to a new IP it doesn't recover by itself but i needs some manual or scripted operations. 

 

The scripted actions should be based on the following concepts and procedures:

 

• When a robot Ip changes, following the procedure below to fix it: Change of iIP address of robot or hub

 

• When a robot/hostname IP change occur, some "clean up" operations might be  necessary: 
  
  Below is the procedure to Clean any robot "leftovers"
  
  

1. Stop the Nimsoft Robot Watcher service

2. In IM, Remove the redundant robot entry from the hub (via deletion of robot.sds or removerobot callback)

3. In OC, find the unwanted entries in the Inventory and Delete them. 

       

5. On the robot server file system following: How to clear the niscache

6. Start the Nimsoft Robot Watcher service

 

7. Validate security for any probes that fail the file check. (a nas AO profile and LUA script can be used for this purpose)

Additional Information

Related KB: Change of ip address of robot or hub