Installation Prerequisites
- The individual performing this installation has some Linux experience.
- NMIS8 is installed on the same server where opHA will be installed
- NMIS8 is installed in /usr/local/nmis8
- opHA will be installed into /usr/local/nmis8
- Root access is available (not always needed but much easier)
- Perl 5.10
- RRDtool 1.4.7
- NMIS 8.3.24G or later
- opHA will be installed onto the Master and each Slave NMIS server
Installation Steps
Install CPAN Libraries
NMIS optionally uses a UUID for devices, this is enabled by default with using opHA, the Perl CPAN library Data::UUID will be required, this is described in the article Using Unique Identifiers (UUID) for NMIS Nodes. You can install this using CPAN
cpan install Data::UUID
Install opHA
This step will be repeated for each NMIS master and slave server
- Copy the opHA tarball to the slave or master NMIS server (a tarball is a GZIP'd tar file, e.g. opHA-1.1.tar.gz)
- You may need to use SCP or FTP to get the file onto the server.
- The file will now likely be in the users home directory.
- If the installation directory does not already exist
- Change into the directory where the tarball was copied
- Untar the file
ophaVersion=1.4.1 #(not required for Debian/Ubuntu) unalias cp cd ~ tar xvf ~/opHA-$ophaVersion.tar.gz cd opHA-$ophaVersion/ cp admin/convert_nmis_db.pl /usr/local/nmis8/admin cp cgi-bin/connect.pl /usr/local/nmis8/cgi-bin cp lib/NMIS/Connect.pm /usr/local/nmis8/lib/NMIS cp install/Access.opha.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/Tables.opha.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/Table-Nodes.opha.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/BusinessServices.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/Servers.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/Customers.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/ServiceStatus.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/Tenants.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/install cp install/Table-* /usr/local/nmis8/install # Merge your current Access configuration with the opHA access configuration /usr/local/nmis8/admin/updateconfig.pl /usr/local/nmis8/install/Access.opha.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Access.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/admin/updateconfig.pl /usr/local/nmis8/install/Tables.opha.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Tables.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/admin/fixperms.pl
Optional Step - Install or Patch
If this is a fresh installation, copy the following files as samples, if this is an existing installation and you are upgrading, you do not need to do this step.
cp install/Table-Nodes.opha.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Table-Nodes.nmis cp install/BusinessServices.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf cp install/Servers.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf cp install/Customers.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf cp install/ServiceStatus.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf cp install/Tenants.nmis /usr/local/nmis8/conf cp install/Table-* /usr/local/nmis8/conf
Using JSON for NMIS Database
Supported in opHA is having NMIS use JSON for its database, this will require NMIS 8.4.8g or greater. This should be enabled on all servers running in an opHA cluster. The following needs to be run on every master and slave server in a cluster and this should be co-ordinated to run very close together.
/usr/local/nmis8/admin/convert_nmis_db.pl
This script will stop NMIS polling, convert the database files, update the NMIS configuration to use the new database format, then start the polling again.
opHA Authentication Model
opHA has a simple yet strong authentication model, to prevent unwanted access to NMIS data.
The slave is configured with:
- An NMIS user and password, by default this is an Apache htpasswd file, defined in /usr/local/nmis8/conf/users.dat
- An NMIS user, with associated privileges, defined in /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Users.nmis
- An NMIS user to use for the authentication policy enforcement, defined in /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Config.nmis
- Server Community, which the server must use to request data.
The master is configured with (for each slave):
- An NMIS user and password, which needs to match the slave configuration
- A slave/server community, which needs to match the slave configuration.
This model enables you to use separate credentials for each slave or the same credentials for each slave, providing for simple configuration, and more secure configuration if required.
All communications between master and slave can be done over SSL if required, this is supported by configuring your server HTTPD to support SSL and then configuring the master, slave communications to use HTTPS.
opHA Slave Configuration
This configuration will be done on each NMIS Slave Server. By default, the shared community for a slave is "secret" if you want to change this to something specific you can edit the NMIS Configuration item "slave_community" using your favourite text editor, edit this line and change secret to your desired opHA community string.
'server_community' => 'secret',
Verify that the Apache user has been configured for master functions. The default userid is "nmismst" and the file /usr/local/nmis8/conf/users.dat should include an entry like
nmismst:vnnFthCKoHsps
opHA Master Configuration
Server Name for opHA
Server names need to be lower case with no spaces, e.g. NMIS_Server24 is bad, nmis_server24 is good.
Adding Slaves to Servers.nmis
Once the slaves have been setup, you can configure the master with each of its slaves. This is done by editing the file /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Servers.nmis, and adding a section for each server.
The default entries look like this:
'nmis1' => {
'community' => 'secret',
'name' => 'nmis1',
'config' => 'Config.nmis',
'protocol' => 'https',
'port' => '443',
'host' => 'nmis1.domain.com',
'portal_protocol' => 'http',
'portal_port' => '80',
'portal_host' => 'nmis1.alternate.com',
'cgi_url_base' => '/cgi-nmis8',
'url_base' => '/nmis8',
'user' => 'nmismst',
'passwd' => 'C00kb00k'
},
'nmis2' => {
'community' => 'secret',
'name' => 'nmis2',
'config' => 'Config.nmis',
'protocol' => 'http',
'port' => '80',
'host' => '192.168.1.42',
'portal_protocol' => 'http',
'portal_port' => '80',
'portal_host' => 'nmis2',
'cgi_url_base' => '/cgi-nmis8',
'url_base' => '/nmis8',
'user' => 'nmismst',
'passwd' => 'C00kb00k'
}
Edit the entry to look like this, in this example the hostname of the slave is "vali":
'vali' => {
'community' => 'YOURNAMEHERE',
'name' => 'vali',
'config' => 'Config.nmis',
'protocol' => 'http',
'port' => '80',
'host' => 'vali',
'portal_protocol' => 'http',
'portal_port' => '80',
'portal_host' => 'vali',
'cgi_url_base' => '/cgi-nmis8',
'url_base' => '/nmis8',
'user' => 'nmismst',
'passwd' => 'C00kb00k'
}
There are many options in this configuration but unless you are wanting to change the defaults considerably most of them will not matter. If you wanted to use HTTPS to connect between the master and the slave, you could use https as the protocol and update the port accordingly. You can use different user and passwd permissions here.
If you were presenting the Slave and needed to use an alternate connection, e.g. through a reverse proxy for presenting a portal, you would modify the portal_protocol, portal_port and portal_host accordingly.
Promoting NMIS to be a Master
By default, an NMIS server operates in standalone mode (which is also slave mode), to have NMIS behave in a masterly fashion, you will need to modify the configuration, so you can edit the NMIS Configuration item "sever_master" using your favourite text editor, edit this line and change from "false" to "true".
'server_master' => 'true',
Adding Slave Groups to Master
On each slave you will need to determine which groups are currently in use.
[root@vali conf]# grep group_list /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Config.nmis 'group_list' => 'HQ,HQDev',
This will result in a list of groups which need to be added to the NMIS Master, edit /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Config.nmis and add these groups to that list, this is a comma separated list.
'group_list' => 'NMIS8,DataCenter,Branches,Sales,Campus,HeadOffice,HQ,HQDev',
Limiting Master Group Collection
opHA supports Multi-Master, that means you can have several masters collecting information from the same slaves if required. This could be especially useful if you wanted to have one master with all groups on a slave, and another master with different groups from different slaves, effectively sharing some information between groups.
To do this you use the group property in the Servers.nmis file. Edit the file and add the group property in and a regular expression in for the groups, this will take the form
'group' => 'Brisbane|Boston|Saratoga',
This will match all groups contain the sub-strings, Brisbane, Boston or Saratoga. A complete server entry would look like this.
'demo' => {
'community' => 'secret',
'name' => 'demo',
'config' => 'Config',
'protocol' => 'http',
'port' => '80',
'host' => '192.168.1.42',
'group' => 'Brisbane|Boston|Saratoga',
'portal_protocol' => 'http',
'portal_port' => '80',
'portal_host' => 'demo.dev.opmantek.com',
'cgi_url_base' => '/cgi-nmis8',
'url_base' => '/nmis8',
'user' => 'nmismst',
'passwd' => 'C00kb00k'
},
Test Master Collection
You can verify if the master is collecting data from the slaves by running this command
[root@thor conf]# /usr/local/nmis8/bin/nmis.pl type=master debug=true sleep=1 NMIS Copyright (C) 1999-2011 Opmantek Limited (www.opmantek.com) This program comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; This is free software licensed under GNU GPL, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions; see www.opmantek.com or email contact@opmantek.com NMIS version 8.3.4G 14:00:33 nmisMaster, Running NMIS Master Functions 14:00:33 nmisMaster, Master, processing Slave Server vali 14:00:33 nmisMaster, Get loadnodedetails from vali 14:00:33 nmisMaster, Get sumnodetable from vali 14:00:34 nmisMaster, get summary8 from vali 14:00:34 nmisMaster, get summary16 from vali [root@thor conf]#
Server Priority
To handle devices being managed by more than one server with some determinism, there is a new feature in opHA 1.4 for server priority. By default a master server is priority 10 and a slave is priority 5, if you have two slaves managing the same nodes and you want slave1 to be used as the primary source of information, set the server priority in the Servers.nmis file to be higher than on slave2, or conversely lower the priority on slave2.
'nmis1' => {
'name' => 'nmis1',
'config' => 'Config',
'protocol' => 'http',
'port' => '3000',
'host' => 'nmis1.domain.com',
'portal_protocol' => 'http',
'portal_port' => '80',
'portal_host' => 'nmis1.alternate.com',
'server_priority' => '6',
'cgi_url_base' => '/cgi-nmis8',
'url_base' => '/nmis8',
'user' => 'nmismst',
'passwd' => 'C00kb00k'
},
'nmis2' => {
'name' => 'nmis2',
'config' => 'Config',
'protocol' => 'http',
'port' => '3000',
'host' => '192.168.1.42',
'portal_protocol' => 'http',
'portal_port' => '80',
'portal_host' => 'nmis2',
'server_priority' => '4',
'cgi_url_base' => '/cgi-nmis8',
'url_base' => '/nmis8',
'user' => 'nmismst',
'passwd' => 'C00kb00k'
}
This works with the master as well, with the master server being a higher priority by default. The master priority is set with the NMIS configuration option, master_server_priority and is 10 by default.
'master_server_priority' => 10,
Running a Master Collection
You can optionally have the NMIS polling cycle do the master collection, or you can run it separately from Cron. If you want to have it seperate which is a good option, change the following NMIS configuration item nmis_master_poll_cycle to be false in the file /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Config.nmis:
'nmis_master_poll_cycle' => 'false',
Then add this line to the crontab which runs your nmis collections.
*/2 * * * * /usr/local/nmis8/bin/nmis.pl type=master
This will get your collections running every 2 minutes regardless of other polling. There is also an option called master_sleep which is so that your type=update and type=master can run every 1 minute and still have data, the default offset is 15.
Conclusion
After refreshing the web pages on the NMIS Master server you will see the data from the slaves.