Skip to main content

NAV

Installation instructions for Debian

Preparation

To ensure your can always get the latest NAV package directly from our package repository, you should:

  • Ensure HTTPS support for APT is installed on your system
  • Trust the GPG key we use to sign the package archive
  • Add our archive to your list of APT sources

Here’s how to do it:

Debian 11 (Bullseye)

Debian 11 lost some packages that NAV was dependent on. These were reintroduced in the official backports repository (and are present again in the regular archives Debian 12). These instructions therefore include adding the backports package repository to your package lists:

sudo apt-get install -y curl apt-transport-https ca-certificates dirmngr software-properties-common
sudo mkdir -p --mode=0755 /usr/local/share/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://nav.uninett.no/debian/gpg | gpg --dearmor | sudo tee /usr/local/share/keyrings/nav.gpg >/dev/null
echo 'deb [signed-by=/usr/local/share/keyrings/nav.gpg] https://nav.uninett.no/debian bullseye nav' \
     | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nav.list
echo 'deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye-backports main' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nav

Further instructions

Please read the instructions in /usr/share/doc/nav/README.Debian to complete your configuration of NAV on Debian. You may then proceed to our getting started-guide.

If you need additional help in setting up and configuring Graphite on your NAV server, please refer to the how-to guide “Installing Graphite for use with NAV on Debian”.

Bugs

If you have problems with the package itself, please report them at https://github.com/uninett/nav-debian/issues. If you want to report bugs in NAV, you can do so at https://github.com/uninett/nav/issues.

Installation instructions for Virtual Appliance

We’ve built a virtual appliance in OVF format for those who want to get quickly started with NAV. Most popular virtualization environments can import this appliance (Though you may need to use VMWare’s OVFTool to import it properly into VMWare).

The appliance is regularly built through automated GitHub workflows, usually based on a 64-bit stable version of Debian GNU/Linux, with NAV installed from the packages available at our APT repository (see the Debian section above). This also means that NAV is easily upgradeable using Debian’s aptitude or apt-get tools.

Downloading the appliance files

NAV virtual appliance releases are available at GitHub.

Configuration steps after booting the appliance

  • Log in as root and change the root password from navrocks to something else (using the passwd command)
  • Edit /etc/aliases to add a decent email address to forward root’s email to. Then run the newaliases command.
  • Fix the network configuration (/etc/network/interfaces) and restart the networking service using systemctl restart networking
  • Add networks that shall be allowed to talk to the appliance in /etc/hosts.allow (both clients to the NAV web interface and network equipment that send SNMP traps)
  • Set a proper hostname/domain name in the following files: /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/mailname and /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf