Windows discovery using MID installed on LINUX machine

Nitin15 · ‎09-14-2017

Hi,

Can we do discovery of Windows servers using a MID server installed on LINUX machines and Vice Versa.

Is there any work around available for this ?

Thanks and Regards,

Nitin Sharma

tim_broberg · ‎09-17-2017

Historically, the problem has been the lack of Windows APIs for Linux, but powershell has been opensourced within the last year.

When and if that will be available is not known.

PowerShell is open sourced and is available on Linux | Blog | Microsoft Azure

View solution in original post

Dave Ainsworth · ‎09-14-2017

Hi Nitin,

Unfortunately it is not possible to discover Windows machines from MID servers hosted on Linux servers. MID servers installed on Windows can discover both Windows and Linux.

Regards,

Dave

Dave Smith1 · ‎09-14-2017

You can definitely discover Linux-based platforms using a MID installed under Windows.
You may encounter difficulties discovering Windows-based devices using a Linux MID server.

The compatibility issue lies in the way in which Windows probes are written: many use WMI calls which Linux can't perform. However, Linux discovery is generally based around SSH commands or SNMP queries, which Windows supports.

General rule of thumb: if you're discovering Windows, a MID running in on a Windows platform is safer.

Marlos · ‎09-14-2017

Hi Nitin,

There are some WMI clients for Linux out there so in theory you could invoke WMI commands from Linux by using these clients. Our WMI probes are designed specifically for Windows platforms and may not work on these WMI clients installed on Linux as each of these clients may have a different implementation.

Dave Smith1 · ‎09-15-2017

Marlos Barroso wrote:

There are some WMI clients for Linux out there so in theory you could invoke WMI commands from Linux by using these clients.

Oh, wow - wasn't aware of this. Quick search around uncovered:

However, these will have a slightly different command structure to the "wmic" command run under Windows - so although you can perform WMI calls to the target Windows device, the way in which the platform instructs the MID to do so will be windows-specific; these calls will have to be amended to become SSH commands running WMI calls and parsing the results back differently, somehow.

(or, as Marlos wrote: the implementations are different - the target device won't see any difference but the MIDs themselves will need different instructions to produce the same call)

Pity, that. Would be nice if there was an abstraction layer that translated WMI calls into Win/Lin-specific operations - it would be a step closer to platform-agnostic MID (which I believe was the original intention for the MID being java-based).