Big Sister - INSTALL

- Big Sister Installation
- Prerequisits
- Installation
- Initial Configuration

## Big Sister Installation

    The 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.

## Prerequisits

    Before 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).

## Installation

    If 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 Configuration

    Please 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 ...