How to Determine Add On Components for RSA NetWitness Platform Servers Using TSR Reports

Issue

RSA NetWitness continues to support additional add-on components, such as the PCI 10 GB NIC, SAN HBA, so forth.
When a customer owns one or more of these components and requires an RMA, it is important to know if these components are in the system.
Having this information can help ensure that the components are moved to the new appliance once it arrives at the customer's site or to help with getting the components pre-installed under special circumstances.

Tasks

The TSR tool is created by Dell to assist their technical support team with retrieving vital information about server hardware. The TSR tool provides a listing of all add-on cards visible in NetWitness Series 5 and Series 6 servers. As NetWitness continues to qualify to add on components, it will be more important to know the actual hardware layout of any NetWitness server. Moving forward a TSR tool output may be required for any server-based RMA requests.

Currently, there are two ways of retrieving a TSR output.

1. The iDRAC interface (Preferred).
2. Or a special command-line tool.

iDRAC8 Interface - Series5

1. Log into the iDRAC8 interface.
2. Go to Troubleshooting > SupportAssist
3. A window may appear asking to register for SupportAssist, press Cancel as this is not required.
4. Click the Create New OS Data button to initiate the TSR request.
5. Once the TSR_Collect data collection job has finished, see Overview > Job Queue save a copy of the TSR report to local disk. In Troubleshooting > SupportAssist select Save Locally and Save Collection.  The TSR{Date}_{Serial_Number}.zip file will be save to the Downloads folder.  Send this file to NetWitness Support for review.

iDRAC9 Interface - Series6

1. Log into the iDRAC9 interface.
2. Go to Maintenance > SupportAssist
3. A window may appear asking to register for SupportAssist, press Cancel as this is not required.
4. Click the Start a Collection button to initiate the TSR request.

5. The SupportAssist Collection box will appear. Set the Collection Preferences to Save Locally.

6. A progress bar will appear for the collection process. The collection process can take up to 10 minutes to complete the collection process.
7. Once the capture is completed, click the Save and View button to retrieve the TSR output.

 

Command-Line Tool

Note: The TSR CLI report tool only works on Series 5 and Series 6 servers that are on NetWitness 11.3 or higher.

1. Download the rsa_hw_report_v4.tar file.  If the tool has already been installed once, skip to step 4 below.
2. SCP the tar file to the /opt/rsa directory on the NetWitness Server that requires the TSR to be run on it.
3. Untar the file with the following commands:

4. Run the install.sh script to install the required packages.

5. Once the installation is complete the report will start automatically.
6. Select the hardware type the script is running on (Series 5 or Series 6).

7. After the hardware series is selected the tool will collect three different reports, which are shown below, and store them under the reports directory.

• bios_fw_versions.txt
• pci_slots.txt
• tsr.zip

8. In addition to the three previously mentioned files, there will also be an allreports.tar file created that contains all the above reports. This should be sent to NetWitness Support for review.
9. After the initial install the TSR Report can be generated again by running the following script.

For Series 5: For Series 6:

Notes

Please see the internal version of this page for TSR tool training.

Product Details

RSA Product Set: RSA NetWitness Platform
RSA Product/Service Type: Series 5, Series 6
RSA Version/Condition: 11.3.x, 11.4.x, 11.5.x, 11.6.x
Platform: CentOS
O/S Version: 7

Summary

When performing RMAs, it may be necessary to know what non-standard add-on components are in a system before performing an RMA. This article will work through the process of retrieving the required information.

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