Big Sister InstallationThe installation procedure is now GNU autoconf based. This primarily means that Big Sister behaves more like other Open Source software packages than before. It also means that the installation process is quite different from what it was before. This document currently only describes the installation from source on an Unix flavour system. Installation of the Win32 version is explicitly not included here. PrerequisitsBefore you can install Big Sister you should think about installing a few things that may improve Big Sister's functionality/performance. Currently you still have to care about downloading and installing the here mentioned packages yourself, sorry. Perl modules: - GD (required if you attempt to use graphical displays - available from www.cpan.org) - Simon Leinen's SNMP (required if you attempt to monitor SNMP devices) - http://www.switch.ch/misc/leinen/snmp/perl/index.html - LWP::UserAgent (enables realhttp test and will allow you to install plugins directly from the Big Sister download site) - available as "libwww-perl" from www.cpan.org - URI (goes together with LWP::UserAgent) - www.cpan.org - Net::SMTP (if you want Big Sister to send alarms via SMTP rather than via the "mail" command) - www.cpan.org Other software packages: - RRDTool (required if you attempt to use performance data collection) - available from http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/ - SpeedyCGI (speeds up Big Sister CGIs) - available from http://daemoninc.com/SpeedyCGI/ Note that when you are installing RRDTool and SpeedyCGI you have to make sure they install their binaries in a directory which is included in Big Sister's PATH (/usr/bin is a good choice IMHO). InstallationIf you have not done so, it is time to create an account the Big Sister daemons will run under, now. The default user name for this account is "bs", but every other login name will do too. You can now run the configuration procedure by changing directory into the Big Sister package and run ./configure Configure will try to use reasonable defaults, but it is a good idea to browse through its configuration options and look for things you want to have configured differently. Please run ./configure --help to see all the supported options. Especially useful options in my eyes are: --prefix <dir> install Big Sister elsewhere than in /usr/local --with-user=<login> use some other user than the default "bs" --with-cgi=<URL> the URL of the directory your browser will find the Big Sister CGIs under (defaults to "/cgi") --with-url=<URL> the URL of the directory your browser will find the "www" directory of Big Sister (defaults to "/bs") Once you have run configure and you are happy with the configuration it generated you can run make install to install the whole Big Sister package or make install-agent to just install the agent, or make install-server to just install the server. During the installation process a Big Sister boot script will be placed in the "init" directory of your system (/etc/init.d, /sbin/init.d, /etc/rc.d/init.d, whatever else). It's up to you to enable this script by placing the necessary links in the rc*.d directories or using chkconfig (if your system supports this). Initial ConfigurationPlease browse through the configuration to make sure everything looks fine for you. At least - change the adm/uxmon-net file so that the "localhost" string besides the word "bsdisplay" gets replaced by the true name of your Big Sister server - have a quick glance at adm/bb-display.cfg (server configuration) Now you can start Big Sister the first time using bin/bb_start start Big Sister should immediately start to generate HTML pages in the "www" sub directory. It is a good time now to configure your web server so that you can access the "www" directory via a browser using the URL you set with the --with-url option above. Also think about copying the Big Sister CGI programs to a CGI directory and configure the web server so that browsers can access them via the URL configured with the --with-cgi option. Sorry, Big Sister currently does not do this for you ... |