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

Installing Perl modules
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### Installing Perl modules

| Note
If you are using the binary Windows package you already have all the necessary Perl modules implicitly. If you can bare working with ActiveState Perl (a Windows Perlinterpreter), it comes with its own easy way of installing modules (see http://www.activestate.com/). For Linux systems many modules are available via RPM packages from your distributor. If you haven't got your Linux distribution handy or if a certain perl module seems to be missing, you can always get them from CPAN and follow their installation directives. You will find a list of CPAN mirrors on http://www.cpan.org/.

You might have to install additional perl modules to enable some Big Sister health checks or certain display functionality. For more information about specific health checks and their inter-dependancies please see under the appropriate section in chapter **. For general use, the following modules are highly recommended:

- SNMP - All the SNMP functionality in the agent and the server bases on Simon Leinen's SNMP module available fromhttp://www.switch.ch/misc/leinen/snmp/perl/).

- GD - Big Sister can present system status overviews as a graphical image map. This functionality bases on the GD module available from CPAN (install it on the server system).

- Net::SMTP - Alarming is usually done via E-Mail and the sendmail program. If you prefer your Big Sister server to directly transmit alarm mails via SMTP - e.g. because you are running Big Sister on a non-Unix system - you will have to install the Net::SMTP module available from CPAN on your server system.

All of the above modules - except for the GD module - are easy to install. Just follow the instructions in the respective module. Please check carefully if the required module is already installed on your system before you touch your (running) perl installation. The command `perldoc perlmodlib` gives you a somewhat verbose list of all perl modules installed on your system. The command `perldoc [moule name]` can be used to check for single modules and get even more verbose documentation (in case the requested module is installed).

| Note
On most systems these commands cannot be used by the root user.

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