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• 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 Primary and each Poller NMIS server

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This step will be repeated for each NMIS master Primary and poller server

• Copy the opHA tarball to the poller or master Primary NMIS server (a tarball is a GZIP'd tar file, e.g. opHA-1.1.tar.gz)
  1. 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

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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 Primary and poller server in a cluster and this should be co-ordinated to run very close together.

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• 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 Primary is configured with (for each poller):

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All communications between master Primary and poller can be done over SSL if required, this is supported by configuring your server HTTPD to support SSL and then configuring the masterPrimary, poller communications to use HTTPS.

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Verify that the Apache user has been configured for master Primary functions.  The default userid is "nmismst" and the file /usr/local/nmis8/conf/users.dat should include an entry like

nmismst:vnnFthCKoHsps

opHA

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Primary 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.

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Once the pollers have been setup, you can configure the master Primary with each of its pollerss.  This is done by editing the file /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Servers.nmis, and adding a section for each server.

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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 Primary and the poller, 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 Poller 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

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Primary

By default, an NMIS server operates in standalone mode (which is also poller mode), to have NMIS behave in a masterly fashionPrimary fashion, you will need to modify the configuration, so you can edit the NMIS Configuration item "sever_masterPrimary" using your favourite text editor, edit this line and change from "false" to "true".

'server_master' => 'true',

Adding Poller Groups to

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Primary

On each poller you will need to determine which groups are currently in use.

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This will result in a list of groups which need to be added to the NMIS MasterPrimary, edit /usr/local/nmis8/conf/Config.nmis and add these groups to that list, this is a comma separated list.

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You can also use the admin script /usr/local/nmis8/admin/grouplist.pl on the master Primary to find and patch all groups used by all devices imported from the pollers.   

Once opHA has succesfully pulled/pushed the devices from poller to master Primary you can analyse and patch the groups list by using the following.

# Simply list all found groups so you can add them to 'group_list' => '...'   as above
[root@opmantek ~]# /usr/local/nmis8/admin/grouplist.pl 
Branches
DataCenter
IOSXR
NMIS8
The following is the list of groups for the NMIS Config file Config.nmis
'group_list' => 'Branches,DataCenter,NMIS8,IOSXR',
## You can then simply copy this last line to replace the curren line in Config.nmis 

### Alternatively the script can automatically update the Config.nmis file's 'group_list' entry for you using the patch=true argument as follows:
/usr/local/nmis8/admin/grouplist.pl patch=true

Limiting

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Primary Group Collection

opHA supports Multi-MasterPrimary, that means you can have several masters Primarys collecting information from the same pollers if required.  This could be especially useful if you wanted to have one master Primary with all groups on a poller, and another master Primary with different groups from different pollers, effectively sharing some information between groups.

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'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

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Primary Collection

You can verify if the master Primary is collecting data from the pollers by running this command

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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 Primary server is priority 10 and a poller is priority 5, if you have two pollers managing the same nodes and you want poller1 to be used as the primary source of information, set the server priority in the Servers.nmis file to be higher than on poller2, or conversely lower the priority on poller2.

'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 Primary as well, with the master Primary server being a higher priority by default.  The master Primary priority is set with the NMIS configuration option, master_server_priority and is 10 by default.

 'master_server_priority' => 10,

Running a

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Primary Collection

You can optionally have the NMIS polling cycle do the master Primary 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:

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After refreshing the web pages on the NMIS Master Primary server you will see the data from the pollers.