Jffnms Installation and Setup Guide

1.0 2006-03-10 Jffms Basics

Introduction

Jffnms is a network management and monitoring system. It allows you to grab information from many different kinds of hosts and protocols. With this guide, we aim to show you how to get Jffnms properly installed and have your systems monitored by this amazing tool.

Initial Setup

Installation

Just like any package in Portage, jffnms can be installed with emerge:

# emerge jffnms

Jffnms should be installed in /opt/jffnms/.

Configuring Apache 2 This very basic configuration procedure for apache does not cover all aspects of setting up a web server.

Sometimes you will want to run Jffnms on your local computer instead of a remote server. If this is your case, it is very likely that you don't have an apache setup running. Don't worry about installing apache though, Portage has already done that for you. Nevertheless, you still have to configure and test apache, which (luckily) is pretty straightforward. Start by adding apache to your default runlevel:

# rc-update add apache2 default
 * apache2 added to runlevel default
 * rc-update complete.

If you haven't done it yet, it's time to start apache2:

# /etc/init.d/apache2 start

Finally, point your browser at http://localhost/ and you should be presented with a home page about your newly installed Apache 2. Now that we know that Apache is up and running, we can proceed to the mod_php configuration. Fire up your favorite text editor, open /etc/conf.d/apache2 and add -D PHP4 the APACHE2_OPTS variable.

# nano -w /etc/conf.d/apache2
APACHE2_OPTS="-D DEFAULT_VHOST -D PHP4"

After that, you should create a symlink to the Jffnms install directory in your Apache document root dir. In Gentoo, by default, Apache uses /var/www/localhost/htdocs as document root. So, you should do the following:

# cd /var/www/localhost/htdocs && ln -s /opt/jffnms/htdocs

Configuring PHP

Now that apache is running, it is time to configure PHP. Jffnms requires that you set some variables in php.ini in order to run. The php.ini file is usually located in /etc/php/apache2-php4/php.ini. You have to set these variables to the following values:

# nano -w /etc/php/apache2-php4/php.ini
register_globals = On
register_argc_argv = On 
error_reporting  =  E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE
allow_url_fopen = On
include_path = ".:/usr/share/php4:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/php/PEAR"
short_open_tag = On

Database setup Please note again that this a very basic configuration procedure for any database system and does not cover all aspects of setting up such systems.

Jffnms allows you to use either PostgreSQL or MySQL as its database. Here we'll show you how to create the database and necessary tables where Jffnms will store its data. It's important to note that it isn't necessary to have a database running localy to run Jffnms and except for the fact that you need to run this commands on the remote host, the procedure is the same.

Setting Up PostgreSQL If you already have a PostgreSQL database up and running, you can proceed to the next section.

You should add PostgreSQL to your default runlevel so it's started each time you boot your computer.

# rc-update add postgresql default
 * postgresql added to runlevel default
 * rc-update complete.

Now, you must prepare PostgreSQL directories. This is done through the initdb command. By default, PostgreSQL data directories are generally stored in /var/lib/postgresql/data.

The following command must be run with your PostgreSQL user. By default this user is generally called "postgres".

# su - postgres
$ initdb -D /var/lib/postgresql/data
The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale C.

creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/global ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/pg_xlog ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/pg_xlog/archive_status ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/pg_clog ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/pg_subtrans ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/base ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/base/1 ... ok
creating directory /var/lib/postgresql/data/pg_tblspc ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 100
selecting default shared_buffers ... 1000
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /var/lib/postgresql/data/base/1 ... ok
initializing pg_shadow ... ok
enabling unlimited row size for system tables ... ok
initializing pg_depend ... ok
creating system views ... ok
loading pg_description ... ok
creating conversions ... ok
setting privileges on built-in objects ... ok
creating information schema ... ok
vacuuming database template1 ... ok
copying template1 to template0 ... ok

WARNING: enabling "trust" authentication for local connections
You can change this by editing pg_hba.conf or using the -A option the
next time you run initdb.

Success. You can now start the database server using:

    postmaster -D /var/lib/postgresql/data
or
    pg_ctl -D /var/lib/postgresql/data -l logfile start

If initdb was successfully executed, you can go back to your root user and start PostgreSQL.

# /etc/init.d/postgresql start

Using PostgreSQL as database

Once you have your PostgreSQL set up and running, you have to create a Jffnms user and a database to store host data. We provide files to do both.

If you don't use /usr/portage as your portage dir ($PORTDIR) you have to change the last part of these commands to whatever your portage dir is.

# psql template1 postgres < /usr/portage/net-analyzer/jffnms/files/postgresql_db

# psql template1 postgres < /usr/portage/net-analyzer/jffnms/files/postgresql_db_tables

Finally, you need to create all the tables where data will be stored:

# psql jffnms jffnms < /opt/jffnms/docs/jffnms-0.8.2.pgsql

Once you have run those steps, PostgreSQL database configuration for Jffnms should be ok.

Using MySQL as database. Installing and configuring a MySQL database is not covered in this guide. Please see our MySQL Startup Guide.

In case you want to run Jffnms with MySQL, the process is a bit simpler. We provide two files to create database, user and tables for MySQL.

If you don't use /usr/portage as your portage dir ($PORTDIR) you have to change the last part of these commands to whatever your portage dir is.

# mysql -u username -p password < /usr/portage/net-analyzer/jffnms/files/mysql_db

# mysql -u jffnms -pjffnms jffnms < /opt/jffnms/docs/docs/jffnms-0.8.2.mysql

UDP Port Monitoring and discovery This section covers setting up and running suid programs, so it may not be adequate for systems where security is too much an issue.

If you want UDP port monitoring and discovery, you need to set nmap and fping as a SUID programs. This may give you security hole in case there's a bug in one of them. To set them as a SUID you can run the following commands:

# chmod +s /usr/bin/nmap ; chmod a+x /usr/bin/nmap
# chmod +s /usr/sbin/fping ; chmod a+x /usr/sbin/fping

Configuring Jffnms

Configuring the poller process

The poller process is responsible for gathering data from hosts. In order to collect this data at regular intervals, it must be added to crontab.

# crontab -u jffnms /opt/jffnms/docs/unix/crontab
# crontab -e -u jffnms

Support

Though Jffnms is a wonderful software, it is a bit hard to get it up and running. So if you run into problems with Jffnms, there are some places where you can look for help:

Jffnms Installation Manual
Jffnms Manual
Gentoo Forums

You may also run into problems when configuring Apache to work with PHP (specially if you run both PHP4 and PHP5 on the same system). In that case, our Configuring Apache to Work with PHP4 and PHP5 guide may give you some help.