Keywords: Big Sister, Bigsister, Network Monitor, Network Monitoring, Perl, GPL, Big Brother, manual, SNMP

Installation from sources
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### Installation from sources

When installing Big Sister from the source package you will additionally need at least a working copy of the Make utility and the Bourne shell. This means that you will probably not be able to install Big Sister from source directly on a Windows machine and this section therefore just assumes you are installing on a Unix box.

Before you can proceed you should decide where to store your various Big Sister files (see section ** ). If this is your first installation it might be a good idea to just use the defaults. You should also consider a few points:

- The Web-Pages directory must be accessible via a web browser, probably you will run a web server for this purpose

- Other directories than the Web-Pages directory should not be accessible via a web server for security reasons

- Big Sister will excessively write to the Web-Pages and var directories. They should be located on a fast drive.

- Config files are split into two directories: the adm- and etc- directory. The idea behind this is to keep files shared (e.g. via software distribution) between different installations in etc- and the files local to the respective machine in the adm directory.

Usually you will install Big Sister under its own user account for security reasons. Big Sister daemons will run under this account. Before you can install Big Sister you have to create this account.

Are you still with us? Well, then we can start the installation. Unpack your Big Sister source package, log in as root and change directory into your package. Now you can run the configuration procedure by changing directory into the Big Sister package directory 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 "/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

install the whole Big Sister package or

    make install-agent

just install the agent, or

    make install-server

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).

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