We've created a virtual appliance in OVF format for those who want to get quickly started with NAV. Most popular virtualization environments can import this appliance.

The appliance runs 64-bit Debian GNU/Linux 6 (a.k.a. Squeeze), with NAV installed from the packages available at http://pkg-nav.alioth.debian.org/. This also means that NAV is easily upgradeable using Debian's aptitude or apt-get tools.

Download the appliance from eske (UNINETT's cloud storage “Dropbox clone”)

• log in as 'root' and change the root-password (passwd)
• add a decent email-address to forward root's email to in /etc/aliases
• fix the network-configuration (/etc/network/interfaces) and restart network with /etc/init.d/network restart
• add networks that shall be allowed to talk to the appliance in /etc/hosts.allow (both clients to the NAV webinterface and network equipment that send SNMP traps)
• also fix hostname/domainname in the following files: /etc/hosts, /etc/resolv.conf, /etc/mailname and /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf.conf

A virtual machine was created on a VMware ESX server with 512MB RAM and 4GB of disk. Choises made during installation of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (aka. etch):

• American English as language
• using LVM on the disk to ease the expand-process
• all files in one large partition

After a normal installation, the following changes are made:

• the user added at install-time was removed
• so was the root-alias in /etc/aliases pointing to that user
• backport.org- and pkg-nav.alioth.debian.org-mirrors added to /etc/apt/sources.list
• installed open-vm-tools (from backports.org) and ran the commands module-assistant prepare open-vm and module-assistant auto-install open-vm to build the opem-vm-modules
• installed openssh-server
• added 'ALL: 127.0.0.1' to /etc/hosts.allow and 'ALL: ALL' to /etc/hosts.deny
• installed nav (aptitude install –without-recommends nav) and answered yes to all question
• followed /usr/share/doc/nav/README.Debian
• poweroff the machine and take a snapshot
• Remove the network configuration in /etc/network/interfaces.
• Change the temporary root-password to an empty one in /etc/shadow (and remove /etc/shadow-).
• Adjust hostname in the following files: /etc/hosts, /etc/mailname and /etc/exim4/update-exim4.conf
• Power off the virtual machine and export as appliance.

• document how to make the appliance send emails

• OVF - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Virtual_Machine_Format
• NAV - http://nav.uninett.no/
• Debian GNU/Linux - http://www.debian.org/