And run this code to do the update:

$cpan> install Bundle::CPAN
$cpan> reload cpan

chown -Rv nmis:nmis <nmisdir>
chmod -Rv g+w <nmisdir>

If you decide on a different user and group name, update the NMIS Configuration Config.nmis accordingly.

admin/fixperms.pl

# This script will fix the permissions for NMIS based on the configuration /usr/local/nmis8/admin/../conf/Config.nmis
# The directory to be processed is: /usr/local/nmis8
# The user will be set to: nmis
# The group will be set to: nmis

Initial NMIS Test

Initial NMIS Troubleshooting

RRDTool Libraries not Found

(This should no longer be a problem on NMIS8, but if you did something different with RRDTool, this is an easy way to fix it.)

For some reason, on some distros, NMIS will not be able to find the file RRDs.pm, which is a PERL module that comes with RRDtool, and that NMIS needs to be able to find and use. I ran into this problem. Fortunately, the NMIS development team included a small hack to take care of this. The line explicitly "uses" the RRDs.pm file in the/usr/local/rrdtool directory tree, but you have to uncomment that line in the NMIS program files themselves.

One way to quickly accomplish that is to run the following script within /usr/local/nmis8/bin and /usr/local/nmis8/cgi-bin. You can just cut 'n' paste it into your terminal.

#!/bin/bash
for file in *.pl
do 
 sed -i 's|#use lib "/usr/local/rrdtool|use lib "/usr/local/rrdtool|g' $file
done

Once this is working, you're ready to head into the <nmisdir>/bin directory and do the "acid" test.

# cd /usr/local/nmis8/bin
# ./nmis.pl type=config debug=true

# ./nmis.pl type=config debug=true
 NMIS version 8.1.1
 
 Root directory of NMIS is /usr/local/nmis8
 
05:20:05 checkConfig, Config Checking - Checking database directories
05:20:05 loadTable, ERROR file does not exist dir=var name=nmis-event
05:20:05 writeHashtoFile, write data to /usr/local/nmis8/var/nmis-event.nmis
05:20:05 loadTable, ERROR file does not exist dir=var name=nmis-system
05:20:05 writeHashtoFile, write data to /usr/local/nmis8/var/nmis-system.nmis
 Continue with bin/nmis.pl type=apache for configuration rules of the Apache web server

NMIS Web Server Setup

Now, we need to set up the Web server so that folks can actually *get to* NMIS and look at the data. :-) That means generating an Apache config file pointing to the NMIS directory tree. NMIS itself is smart enough to be able to generate this for us. Thanks, NMIS team!

All you have to do is this.

 ./nmis.pl type=apache > 00nmis.conf

The main part of the Apache config is as follows.

# NMIS Aliases
 
Alias /nmis8/ "/usr/local/nmis8/htdocs/"
<Directory "">
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
 AllowOverride None
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
</Directory>
 
Alias /menu8/ "/usr/local/nmis8/menu/"
<Directory "/menu8">
 Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
 AllowOverride None
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
</Directory>
 
ScriptAlias /cgi-nmis8/ "/usr/local/nmis8/cgi-bin/"
<Directory "/usr/local/nmis8/cgi-bin">
 Options +ExecCGI
 Order allow,deny
 Allow from all
</Directory>

You can use whatever filename you want instead of "00nmis.conf".  This is very distro-dependent. On CentOS and other Red Hat derivatives, this directory is/etc/httpd/conf.d/. On Debian-style distributions, it's /etc/apache2/sites-available/, and you must also make a symlink to that file from /etc/apache2/sites-enabled.

Note that Debian has an existing "000-default" symlink in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled. Remembering how Apache processes config files, we must rename this symlink to something like "default" without the "000"! This is so "00nmis.conf" will be seen first. Otherwise you'll get the Apache default home page ("It Works!") instead of the NMIS home page. Not what we want. :-)

Debian systems have one other requirement for this file. Two lines need to be edited, specifically the "ErrorLog" and "CustomLog" lines. The lines as they are point to locations present in Red Hat-style distros (this is really Red Hat following Apache's upstream functionality). Debian doesn't do that. Therefore, Apache will complain and refuse to start unless we make these tweaks.

Since Debian puts its Apache logs under /var/log/apache2, I edited these lines to read as follows.

You can also integrate the above extract into your existing web server configuration under its own virtual host, or into an existing set of hosts.  This means you can run other version of NMIS on the same server, or for different customers for example, this is intended to be flexible for alternate integration.

Now that your NMIS config file for Apache is present--and if necessary, tweaked for your distro--start Apache itself. If it's already started, then restart it. How to do this is also very distro-dependent. Unlike me, BSD and Solaris users don't need no steenkin' startup scripts. :-)

Auto Start HTTPD Server

Ensure that you tell Linux to start HTTPD automatically

Start HTTPD Server

You will need to start or restart Apache after configuration, on CentOS:

or

If you get an error like this, it just means the hostname and FQDN on the Linux box hasn’t been setup right, verify you have this setup correctly and update the httpd.conf for Apache accordingly.