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gettingstarted

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Getting Started

This document covers the whole process from installing NAV to getting it up and running, monitoring your network. Follow these 8 steps:

1. Install NAV and dependencies

In principle, NAV can run on any Unix-like platform, as long as Apache, Perl, Python, PHP and Java are supported. See this page for details.

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

  1. Install Debian
  2. apt-get install nav (first add a line to your sources.list, see the package doc).
  3. Follow the REAME.Debian cookbook

2. Adjust NAV configuration files

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

Mandatory adjustments

  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 manage nav.

Webfront configuration

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.

3. Start NAV daemons and cron jobs

Start the NAV daemons and cron jobs with nav start. Verify that the NAV processes are running with nav status

$/etc/init.d/nav status 
Up: alertengine cricket eventengine getDeviceData getvtpvlan iptrace logengine mactrace maintengine 
networkDiscovery pping servicemon smsd thresholdMon

If some of the processes are not running use nav start <processname> to start it.

4. Log into the web interface for the first time

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.

5. Manage NAV user accounts, groups and priviliges

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 adopt authorization in example in the machine tracker, this setting will take effect.

6. Prepare the network equipment for management

  • 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 wiring closets and network/server rooms. 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. See here for details.
  • 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.

7. Seed your database

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

8. Verify that your network is discovered

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

  • getDeviceData should notice the new netbox within 5 minutes, and will then classify the new box in terms of OIDs supported. This can be seen from the netbox report from the report tool.
  • The next step for getDeviceData will be to gather switch/router port information and more. Verify the status using the report tool (or network explorer). You may also check the getDevicedata.log file.

After the individual components has its collected data the mac-to-switchport collector 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 config tree is built. The cricket config builder runs nightly, which you have to wait till the next moring to see statistics. You may however kickstart this process by manually running makecricketconfig.pl.

Put simply; allow some time for your network to be fully discovered :-)

gettingstarted.1191432198.txt.gz · Last modified: 2007/10/03 17:23 by faltin