IMC - Backups not working via Telnet?

Recently I was involved in a discussion on HP’s IMC Forum, where MohammadH needed help with IMC. One of the problems he had was switch backups not working properly. It can be a bit of a chore tracking down the source of the problem, but the best place to start is usually <IMC install dir>\server\conf\log\imccfgbakdm.<current_date>.log.

This logfile is a bit tricky to read, but there is a huge amount of information on the processes that IMC has gone through when trying to back up a device. In this case, we came across these lines in the logfile:

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2013-02-04 08:14:10.344 [INFO (0)] [THREAD(2580)] [CTclExecutor::exec_impl()] Begin to exec: spawn telnet 192.168.0.17
2013-02-04 08:14:10.361 [ERROR (1)] [THREAD(2580)] [CTclExecutor::exec_impl()] Failed to exec cmd: spawn telnet 192.168.0.17, error message: The system cannot find the file specified.

This is a problem that I’ve come across a couple of times, where IMC can’t find the telnet.exe binary it uses for device backup. IMC should use its own copy, located at <IMC install dir>\server\bin\. But what I’ve seen is that if Telnet Client is disabled on Windows 2008 R2 (as it is by default), then IMC never installs its own copy of telnet.exe. Enabling the Windows Telnet Client, and manually copying that binary over doesn’t work either - you must use the version that IMC expects.

The easiest way to find it is to use the original IMC installation files. Look in windows\install\components\common\server\commonserver_win.zip. Extract telnet.exe, and copy it to server\bin\. Backups should now work.

Note: If you use SSH or SNMP read-write, you probably won’t notice this issue.

For a more in-depth look at tracking down problems with a device backup script, and how to fix it, check out my Packetpushers post - “HP IMC: Backup Cisco ASAs via SSH”