OpenNMS on Debian Woody HOWTO: About this Document

1.1 Revision History

0.1 - 2002-11-01 - Ian B. MacDonald - Initial Staging and Debian Operations Manual based on RPMs aliened to .debs

1.0 - 2003-01-28 - iMac - Initial Publication, ONMS v1.02-2

1.1 - 2003-04-03 - iMac- Updates, including DB purge, ONMS v1.11-1

1.2 - 2003-06-24 - iMac - Conversion to LinuxDOC SGML, FAQ and Mailing list links, updates from Debian ONMS Downgrade HOWTO, ONMS v1.11-5woody packages

1.3 - 2003-06-25 - iMac - First public release on opennms.netstatz.com with minor layout changes and some additions

1.4 - 2003-07-14 - iMac - Used It on a box from cold iron. Some refinements, typo-repair and purging of quotes. Increased Woody distinction.

1.5 - 2003-10-15 - iMac - Second pubic release, new sources, new packages, new links to devices, troubleshooting mailing-list archives

1.6 - 2003-12-15 - iMac - Draft - Command line typos, bad links; rewrite required. Added vim, snmp, GetOPT packages...

2.0 - 2004-01-28 - iMac - Draft - Full 1.1.2 support, New mailing list includes, all new links (to match opennms.org changes), upgrade from 1.1.1-5 process, new supplemental utilities

2.0 - 2004-03-11 - iMac - Draft - More 1.1.2 test implementations + Debian Woody R2, upgrade from 111-5 excluded, links to FAQ removed (headings listed instead)

2.0 - 2004-03-20 - iMac - Draft - Finally a readable document that is useful and tested (grin)

2.1 - 2004-03-22 - iMac - Draft - Added package-based kernel updates, hdparm config,

upgrade from 111-5 re-included

1.2 Acknowledgements and Thanks

I would like to acknowledge the following individuals and groups for their valuable contributions that resulted in the creation of this document:

Tarus Balog for his commitment to OpenNMS from the ground up and positive guidance to anyone interested in using this great tool.
The OpenNMS team, Sortova Consulting Group and Oculan for their efforts. This includes Andreas Kerl, Ben Reed, Bill Ayres, Brian Weaver, David Miller, Derek Gillden, Eric Evans, Jacinta Remedios, Jason Johns, Jim Doble, Jose Vicente, Nunez Zuleta, Larin Hennessy, Larry Karnowski, Marshall Christy, Michael Huot, Mike Davidson, Mike Johnson, Nick Wesselman, Oli M., Robert Berkowitz, Seth Leger, Shane O'Donnell, Sowmya Nataraj, Volker Seebode, Wrolf Courtney.
The many contributions to the OpenNMS mailing list from all across the globe.
Tony Simone and Eric Evans for Debianizing this great tool to the FHS standard.
Netstatz clients that use and promote OpenNMS with enthusiasm.
Dan Peachey for great feedback and notes on Debian.
Steve Moyer, Justin Hammond, Micheal baker and others who submitted code snippets via the mailing list.
Blast Internet, and their continued support of Tarus and the OpenNMS solution.
All the people I missed, particularly while distracted with other projects in the nine months prior to v2.0

The acknowledgement section is both difficult and important. Previous releases of this document left out many of the core OpenNMS contributors by name, even though I was communicating with them via the discuss mailing list. My apologies to the gang. Hopefully this release is a little more complete.

1.3 Copyright Information

This document is Copyright 2003 by Ian B. MacDonald. Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html.

Copyright of documentation seems to be a standard. The goal of this section is to promote dissemination of this knowledge through as many channels as possible and also to be notified of any plans to redistribute the HOWTO so that I can keep people apprised of new versions.

If someones toes are being stepped on, let me know. Basically if someone is part of the OpenNMS.org team, I am going to tell them that they can do as they wish with this doc. Everybody else, let me know.

OpenNMS is a trademark of Sortova Consulting Group, Inc. OpenNMS is a registered trademark of Blast Internet Services Inc. OpenNMS is also referred to as ONMS in this document.

Netstatz is a trademark of Netstatz. To find out more visit http://www.netstatz.com. Or track down my personal homepage.

From the Release Notes, the following copyrights are relevant to OpenNMS code and referenced documentation:

1.4 How this document was created

This document was created using Lyx 1.3.2 and the LinuxDOC article (SGML) template. Every once in a while I clicked View->HTML and View->PDF and the rest was history. My desktop system at the time was a Sun Blade 100* running the Debian Sid GNU/Linux (Sparc) distribution. Anyone who would like to create documents easily, and uses Debian, should have a look at the following packages. (Or just apt-get install everything like I did.)

apt-get install docbook docbook-doc docbook-defguide docbook-dsssl docbook-dsssl-doc docbook-utils docbook-xml docbook-xsl jade jadetex openjade ldp-docbook-dsssl ldp-docbook-xsl linuxdoc-tools linuxdoc-tools-text linuxdoc-tools-info linuxdoc-tools-latex sgml-data sgml-base sgmltools-lite sgmlspl sgmls-doc latex2html latex2rtf gv html2text gnuhtml2latex imagemagick

apt-get install lyx

The only trick is to install lyx last, as debconf will help it run a ./configure to build the ~/.lyx directory. If ~/.lyx already exists then lyx will not integrate with new SGML tools (i.e. will not automagically reconfigure). If ./lyx does not exist on startup, it is automatically recreated. Thus one can always delete ~/.lyx to reconfigure lyx for use with new document template and publishing packages.

*The publishing computer was running Debian Sid(unstable) on a VIA/AMD i386 architecture box for >v1.4. It looked and worked exactly the same on big-endian and little-endian architecture. Props to the package maintainers that make Debian Sid fun and powerful on almost any file system architecture. As of v2.0, we now use Lyx 1.3.4 and have only been apt-get upgradeing from the above package set. Debian PowerPC (Mac) users will probably find the same package set produces similar results.

1.5 Feedback and comments

Please send any feedback to Ian B. MacDonald imac@netstatz.com. I'm surprised someone didn't rant about the silly typos in some commands and URLs in early versions of this doc. Negative feedback is often the positive feedback, so hit me hard. I would like to enhance the readability and mood/tone of my documents and work towards a style that is consistent with the types of documents people enjoy and benefit from.

1.6 Why Debian Linux and this Document template?

Why use Debian? One of the great things about Debian is superior package management. Debian stable is one of the most robust, secure and stable Linux distributions. Netstatz promotes and supports Debian and ONMS with enthusiasm, as they are best of breed tools in a changing open source world. In our experience deploying Linux solutions at Netstatz, Debian has proven to be the easiest distribution to maintain and configure. Nothing is forever, and hopefully other distributions will begin to adapt the security, stability and ease of management that Debian has maintained for some time. There are now over 8710 packages in the Debian stable distribution.

Why use this Lyx/SGML format? LinuxDoc SGML is the closest to DocBook XML that requires nothing more than "apt-get install xxx" to create and maintain with Debian. When the Lyx template for DocBook XML is working via packages (or someone shows us what we are missing) we will use that. DocBook XML is the standard according to many authors of document processing HOWTOs at the LDP. LinuxDoc SGML meets the current requirements for submissions to the LDP and is the basis for many current HOWTOs.

1.7 Using Debian Woody vs. Debian Sid or Debian Sarge

Debian Woody (a.k.a stable), Debian Sarge (a.k.a testing) and Debian Sid (a.k.a unstable) are the three distributions maintained by the Debian GNU/Linux team. Debian stable uses only the very tried, tested and true versions of software. I like to think of it as public_e-commerce or online_banking stable. No new features other than security updates are added to the stable distribution once it has been released. This ensures the highest confidence level in package updates to the system.

In other distributions, new features often are included in package updates as their creators often maintain the packages independently of the goals of the operating system. Sometimes new features are desirable before they have reached a tried_and_tested state. For this reason, the unstable and testing distributions provide the newest versions of stable software, which often include dramatic improvements to the interface and functionality, and sometimes introduce new bugs. Desktop users who have previously been interested in the latest version of other operating systems will enjoy the cutting-edge appearance and functionality of the unstable distribution (My Gnome 2 desktop since fall 2002). To provide an example many people can relate with, at the time v1.4 of this document was written, the unstable and testing distributions contained Gnome 2 and Apache 2 whereas the stable distribution maintained Gnome 1.4 and Apache 1.3. At Netstatz, our public servers use Debian stable/woody. Other servers (private, backup and testing) run Debian testing/sarge or a stable/woody base with additional testing/sarge packages. Our private desktop machines run Debian unstable for the latest desktop experience.

This document is for Debian Woody (stable) users. The author's experience is that unstable users only require a mailing-list, or little knowledge in addition to a working Woody example to get unstable to work. To install from CDs, the recommended Debian ISO is v3.0r2 disk 5, a.k.a bf2.4, in order to start with an Ext3 or ReiserFS journalling file system (prevents any file system corruption due to power failures). The Debian ISOs are found easily at LinuxISO.org for anyone without jigdo access. Disk 1 (Non-US or US iso) is needed too as it contains the common Debian base packages, but be sure to boot the installation from disk 5 (bf2.4) in order to get a 2.4 Linux kernel.

Seasoned Debian users will prefer to install from a Minimal CD, a network image, or a set of floppies via the Internet. Don't try to mix versions of Debian CDs and floppies (i.e WoodyR0 disk1 and WoodyR2 disk5). This can sometimes cause installation problems as I discovered with a specific configuration on a device with Tulip NICs and a DAC960 RAID block device.

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