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 ...
