Installing Verax NMS On SuSE, RedHat, And Debian

Requirements

The Verax NMS can be installed on 32 and 64 bit Linux distributions including: SuSE, RedHat Enterprise and Debian using i386 and x64 architectures. It can be also installed in any operating environment supporting Java 1.6 or higher (AS/400, FreeBSD and others).

Before the installation you should check:

The amount of available disk space on the installation drive (It needs about 650 MB of disk space to install and 2 GB of RAM to run).
Availability of target TCP port on the server (typically 80 or other if non-default setting is to be used).
Availability of the database server (Database supporting ANSI SQL and JDBC standards)

Due to license limitations, the MySQL JDBC driver (a.k.a. the Java connector) has to be manually downloaded from the Internet and copied to the relevant NMS installation directories.

Installation

NOTE: This guide descibes installation process of commercial non-free version of Verax NMS (Linux/Unix installation package is available for commercial version only). So, if you want to try Verax NMS Express (which is free) you should simply download virtual machine image an you're good to go (this tutorial will be useless).

Download and unpack installation package (a tar.gz archive with Verax NMS web application and Tomcat server).
Copy the installation files to a temporary directory (for instance /tmp), invoke the following command from the directory:
```
chmod +x install.bin
```
Next run the installation script:
```
./install.bin
```
and follow the on-screen instructions as they appear.

The installation process consists of the following steps:

Target directory selection (by default /opt/verax).
(License Agreement)
Discovery and selection of the Java Runtime Environment to be used (it can be changed after the installation in the java.conf file)
TCP connection port selection. The default value is 8080. Availability of the port will be checked by the installer; however, if another application is using the selected port and is not running at installation time, the conflict will not be detected.
The final stage of installation is adding startup scripts to /etc/init.d for runlevels 3, 4, 5.

Validating The Installation

In order to check if the installation succeeded, run NMS from the command line as presented below:

/etc/init.d/verax-nms start

Once the server startup has been completed, point the browser to the NMS server URL (e.g. http://localhost:8080).

If the configuration page is displayed, the installation was successful and database settings can be configured. If possible, test NMS startup after a reboot.

Runlevels

All the subsequent commands should be run in the root account context. In order to change NMS startup at boot (or runlevel change) time, use the chkconfig command.

Deactivate automatic startup of NMS at runlevel 3, run:

chkconfig --level 3 verax-nms off

Disable NMS completely, use the following command:

chkconfig --level 345 verax-nms off

Re-enable NMS startup at boot time (for levels 3, 4, 5), run:

chkconfig --level 345 verax-nms on

Runlevels at which NMS is running can be checked using:

chkconfig --list verax-nms

On Linux (and other UNIX systems) versions that do not support the chkconfig command, runlevel configuration for NMS is changed using the startup scripts as shown below :

Remove:

rm /etc/rc3.d/S77verax-nms

Add:

ln -s /etc/init.d/verax-nms /etc/rc3.d/S77verax-nms

Configuration File Directory

All the Verax NMS component configuration files are located in /etc/verax.d. The configuration files have .properties extensions.

The administrator user account with the default password is created by the NMS upon the first run. The default login and password are admin and pass.

Starting, stopping and restarting NMS

In order to manage the status of the NMS service (or daemon on UNIX), use the /etc/init.d/verax-nms script.

The example below provides instructions on how to restart the NMS application server:

/etc/init.d/verax-nms restart

Third Party Management Library Installation

Some systems require additional installation of vendor provided libraries, that cannot be bundled with Verax NMS due to licensing or other reasons. These libraries typically come free of charge and can be freely downloaded.

The libraries need to be copied to:

<installation directory>/var/verax/external/lib

The following systems require additional management libraries:

MySQL mysql-connector-java-5.1.14-bin.jar (available from MySQL download site)
IBM WebSphere (the libraries above come with WebSphere distribution)
com.ibm.mq.commonservices.jar
com.ibm.mq.connector.jar
com.ibm.mq.headers.jar
com.ibm.mq.jar
com.ibm.mq.jmqi.jar
com.ibm.mq.pcf.jar (downloaded from http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg24000668U)