Getting Started

Let's get started! We guide you through the process from installing to getting NAV up and running, monitoring your network.

Follow these 8 steps:

1. Install NAV and dependencies
2. Adjust NAV configuration files
3. Start NAV daemons and cron jobs
4. Log into the web interface for the first time
5. Manage NAV user accounts, groups and privileges
6. Prepare your network equipment for management
7. Seed your database (register equipment)
8. Verify that your network is discovered
9. Happy NAV'ing!

In principle, NAV can run on any Unix-like platform, as long as Apache, postgresql, Python and Java are supported. Several distribution packages are available or you can install NAV from source if you like.

• See our download page for details.

If you are looking for the smoothest install - go for the Debian package. Your procedure will then be:

1. Follow our hardware requirements. Hook on a cell phone, if you like.
2. Install Debian
3. aptitude install nav (first add a line to your sources.list, see the package doc).
4. Follow the REAME.Debian cookbook

• Use our available virtual appliance with NAV preinstalled!

All the NAV configuration files are gathered in the etc directory of NAV.

1. In nav.conf set ADMIN_MAIL to the email account of your NAV administrator.
2. In nav.conf set DOMAIN_SUFFIX to your domain.
3. In db.conf set userpw_nav. NAV will use this password to access the NAV database. For debugging purposes you use it yourself to access the database from the shell with psql nav nav.

A number of configuration files adjust how your NAV home page looks. They are all located in the etc/webfront-directory. For details on how to configure what, see the navhome-document.

Start the NAV back-end processes (daemons and cron jobs) with nav start. Verify that the NAV processes are running with nav status.

Here is an example that shows that smsd is down and the rest is up and running:

$/usr/sbin/nav status 
Up: alertengine cricket eventengine ipdevpoll logengine mactrace maintengine networkDiscovery pping servicemon snmptrapd thresholdMon
Down: smsd

If some of the processes are down use nav start <processname> to start it. Verify with nav status. For more information on the back-end processes, see here.

When you first direct your browser to the NAV page served by your Apache, you are unauthenticated and will have the access privileges of an anonymous user.

You may log in to the web interface as the user “admin”, using “admin” as your password. It is of course extremely recommended that you immediately change this password to something harder to guess.

The user “admin” is a member of the group “NAV Administrators”, and will therefore have access to absolutely everything in the web interface.

For this task you use the user adminstration panel. The task typically covers:

• Creating new users. All users that are granted web access to NAV must have an account. If you require a large number of accounts, you can use LDAP.

• Users have group memberships. Each group define in turn privileges. Privileges may in the future cover more topics, for the time being they regulate:
  • which NAV tools a user can access (based on url regexp)
  • if the user can receive SMS messages from the alert system.

Adjust existing groups privileges or add new groups as you like.

• Users also belong to an organization. For the time being - this registration is not important. When we in the future adopt authorization i.e. in the machine tracker, this setting will take effect.

• Your network equipment needs to answer to snmp read polls, and if you use the port blocker, arnold, snmp write is required as well. In any case make sure that only your NAV server (and other management serves, if any) are able to access your equipment with snmp (as snmp security is poor).

• NAV uses DNS to set names of the equipment. If your equipment is not registered in DNS, the IP address is used as name. Consider registering your equipment in DNS prior to seeding them into NAV (the other way around also works, but allow a decent time lag for the name to adjust).

• NAV organizes equipment in rooms. Rooms resemble your network/server rooms and wiring closets. Think through a sensible naming scheme for your rooms. NAV also groups rooms in geographical areas called locations.

• NAV introduces guide lines for router interface descriptions. You are not forced to follow these, but if you do, NAV will automatically know the usage of your subnets. Details here.

• NAV does not require port names for your switch ports, but we recommend that you use this to document where the switch ports connect. NAV will display this information in various tools.

NAV does not autodiscover your network, you need to seed the database with key information. Seeding is covered in this document.

After you have registered your equipment in NAV, the background processes starts collecting information with snmp:

• ipdevpoll should notice the new IP device within 2 minutes and will start collecting switch/router port information and more. Verify the status using the report tool (or network explorer). You may also check the ipdevpoll.log file.

After the individual components has its collected data mactrace will every 15 minutes gather mac to switch port data. This will in turn be used by the physical topology builder that runs every hour.

Cricket statistics collection will not start before your Cricket configuration tree is built. The cricket config builder runs nightly, as a consequence you have to wait till the next morning to see statistics. You may however kick start this process by manually running makecricketconfig.pl.

Put simply; allow some time for your network to be fully discovered and managed