OpenNMS

Thursday, April 17, 2003

In todays Networked world, managing each and every Single Nodes in a Network, manually is very difficult and tedious task for a Network Administrator. So to automate these processes many company entered the Arena and developed verity of Network Management Solutions(NMS). Like IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView, etc. But generally these Solutions are so costly that they are mostly adapted by Huge companies. But lets suppose a Medium company having a few hundred computers but with a very complex infrastructure. like ours in Labs J.  What to do? Yes! A search for an open source alternative (OpenNMS) will do the trick.

OpenNMS is a Linux based Open Source Network Management Solution which basically works on SNMP(Simple Network Management Protocol) to trace and check the performance of a given group of nodes like network devices(Routers, Switches, etc) and PCs in a network and  actively monitor and acknowledge services provided over the Network. This package is written almost in JAVA and it uses XML to store the configuration data. Which makes it very portable. It has a Web Interface as a front end which can be accessed through tomcat to be used from anywhere in the network.

Now Lets Take a Look On Installation process.
We have Tested OpenNMS in PCQLinux 8.0 Workstation with PostgreSQL, JDK 1.4 and tomcat4 Installed Additionally

We assume that your system has JDK 1.4 and Tomcat 4 installed and configured properly. For more information on tomcat Installation refer to PCQuest issue of September 2002 or visit on

http://www.pcquest.com/content/search/showarticle.asp?arid=38577&way=search

To begin with the installation you have to first make your PCQLinux 8.0 box compatible for OpenNMS. To do so first download and install the packages(rrdtool, sharutils and metamail) one by one from http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/opennms/releases/latest/linux-i386-redhat-8/ to your home directory, and issue the following command.

#rpm –ivh rrdtool-1.0.35-0.onms.1.i386.rpm

#rpm –ivh sharutils-4.2.1-7.i386.rpm

#rpm –ivh metamail-2.7-25.i386.rpm

now check that your PostgreSQL Server are running or not by the following commands

#/etc/init.d/postgresql status 

They should return running. If not then issue the following commands to start it up

#/etc/init.d/postgresql start

Now start your tomcat4 up. To do so run

#/etc/init.d/tomcat start

installing OpenNMS. To install it first download  the two files (opennms-1.1.1-1.i386.rpm and opennms-webapp-1.1.1-1.i386.rpm) from the above mentioned site to your home directory. And issue these commands.

#rpm –ivh opennms-1.1.1-1.i386.rpm

#rpm –ivh opennms-webapp-1.1.1-1.i386.rpm

it will automatically create the database in PostgreSQL server.

Box Item starts ---------------ŕ

Known issue with OpenNMS:  if at the time of installing the opennms-1.1.1-1 RPM you get an INDENT error, it means that the user other than ‘postgres’ is not allowed to connect to the database as Indent and opennms is trying to connect to the database with a new user ‘opennms’. So the easiest way to get around it is by modify the file "/var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf” and removing  the ‘#’ symbol before the following lines in it

local      all                                                                   trust

host       all         127.0.0.1     255.255.255.255    trust

Box Item Closed ---------------------ŕ

Running OpenNSM
To run OpenNMS through Tomcat, you have to create a Context for it. To do so open the file

/var/tomcat4/conf/server.xml 

and add the following lines gust above  the “Tomcat Examples Context“

 <Context path="/opennms" docBase="opennms" debug="0"

reloadable="true" crossContext="true">

<Realm className="org.opennms.web.authenticate.OpenNMSTomcatRealm"

homeDir="/opt/OpenNMS/" />

</Context>

and restart tomcat by this command

#/etc/init.d/tomcat4 restart 

Now open  the file /opt/OpenNMS/etc/discovery-configuration.xml and add your network range on which OpenNMS will keep a watch. For example

<include-range retries="2" timeout="3000">

                    <begin>192.168.1.1</begin>

                    <end>192.168.1.254</end>

</include-range>

and then cd to /opt/OpenNMS/bin and issue the command to start OpenNMS

#sh opennms.sh start

Useing OpenNMS
To use OpenNMS Open any browser and type in the address 127.0.0.1:8080/opennms (you can also access through your Network Address from any other PC in the network) In the address bar and hit enter. It will prompt you for Authentication. Issue the Difault Username and password of OpenNMS (admin/admin)  and you will be directed  to the OpenNMS main page. From here everything is self describing so that you can very easily work on it. For more information on OpenNMS visit http://OpenNMS.org/

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