The SCOM Linux agent (scx) uses a SSL certificate to trust communication between the SCOM server and Linux agents. The SCOM server communicates with the agent running on port 1270/tcp.

Normally you will deploy the agent by using the discovery wizard. The SCOM server initially makes a SSH connection to the agent and tries to detect which Linux distribution and version it’s dealing with. Then it will push (sftp) and install the scx package. At the end of the installation it will create a certificate. This certificate needs to be signed by the SCOM server, so the server will fetch the certificate, signs it and delivers it back to the client. At the end the agent will restart to initialize the newly created certificate and agent communication over port 1270/tcp is trusted. The above described actions are executed using the privileged account.

It is also possible to manually sign the certificate created during manual installation of the scx package. This process is described below.

1. Copy the output of the following command including ‘—–BEGIN CERTIFICATE—–‘ and ‘—–END CERTIFICATE—–‘ to your paste buffer.

$ cat /etc/opt/microsoft/scx/ssl/scx-host-[hostname].pem

By using the following command you can view the contents of the certificate:

$ openssl x509 -noout -text \ -in /etc/opt/microsoft/scx/ssl/scx-host-[hostname].pem

2. Create a new file on the SCOM server ‘scx-host-[hostname].pem’, paste the certificate data into it and save this file.

3. Open a windows console and execute the following:

scxcertconfig -sign scx-host-[hostname].pem scx_signed.pem

This command will sign your certificate (scx-host-[hostname].pem) and save it to a new file.

4. Copy the contents of the signed certificate to the paste buffer.

5. Open the ‘/etc/opt/microsoft/scx/ssl/scx-host-[hostname].pem’ on the Linux server, delete it’s contents and paste the newly created certificate data from the paste buffer.

6. Restart the agent by running the following command.

/opt/microsoft/scx/bin/tools/scxadmin -restart

This will initialize the new certificate.

The last step is open the SCOM management console and walk through the discovery wizard to register the agent. A super-user account is probably not required anymore.

After the installation of the scx package you need to create a action account user. The SCOM agent will be run under this user.

Related article: install-scom-agent-on-red-hat-linux
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