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

Installing Big Sister from the RPM-packages
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### Installing Big Sister from the RPM-packages

#### Fresh install

There is not much of a difference between the installation of an agent node and a Big Sister Server. In fact they differ only in two files located at `/etc/bigsister`. A Big Sister Server always needs the `bb-display.cfg` file to make it feel like a server. Agent node always need the `uxmon-net` file. The start script `/etc/init.d/bigsister` checks which file is present and starts the required deamons. In order to avoid any confusion and accidental installation of several servers in one network, the base rpm contains none of the above mentioned configuration files. The installation process using the RPMs is as follows: first you install the base package containing all the binaries, scripts and so on. Afterwards you install an additional RPM package containing the required configuration file to make your base installation a server or an agent node.

The following guidelines assume that you are using the rpm command line interface and not any GUI like gnorpm or others.If you are doing a fresh install,

    rpm -i bigsister-[some rev. number].rpm

should do the job and install the base package. Afterwards you should use

    rpm -i bigsister-agent-[some rev. number].rpm

to install an agent node or

    rpm -i bigsister-server-[some rev. number].rpm

to make it a Big Sister server.

#### Upgrading from previous versions

| Note
Please read the Release Notes of every new version before doing an upgrade.

Updating Big Sister is usually as simple as doing a

    rpm -Uhv bigsister-[some rev. number].rpm

If your previous installation was done from the sources, a

     make

with the same arguments you originally used should do the job. Files that are user-editable (config files, etc.) won't get overwritten, binaries will though.

| Warning
Some things you should be aware of: never install Big Sister for running as a different user to your previous version (well, you'll have to do a 'chown' manually in this case)! config files are usually compatible between releases. Anyway if you'd like to use new features you'll usually have to update your config files of course. And of course config files for newer releases won't necessarily work with older releases. it's always a good idea to back up a working Big Sister installation before upgrading never upgrade an installation from sources with an rpm and the other way around!

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