Chapter 1. Installation

Table of Contents

Prerequisites
Big Sister Components
Installing Big Sister
Paths to files
Installation from sources
Installing Big Sister from the RPM-packages
Installing Big Sister on Debian
Installing Windows binary
Post-installation tasks
Configuring your webserver (Big Sister server only)
Installing Perl modules
Installing RRDTool
Install Big Sister plugins

Prerequisites

The first step in getting a working installation of Big Sister is to download the source package or one of the binary release packages from http://www.bigsister.ch/download/ or from the alternate download site at sourceforge.net http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=14120. At the time this manual was written there was a choice between

  • The source package

  • Big Sister for Windows systems

    • zip archive containing non-compiled but otherwise ready-to-use Big Sister installation (ActivePerl interpreter needed)

    • zip archive with completely pre-compiled binary distribution, where the required Perl interpreter is basically wrapped around the perl-sources in a binary form.

    • MSI package with binary distribution not requiring Perl to be installed, ready for installation via the Windows installer

  • RPMs for Linux systems (independant from any specific plattform or distribution)

  • Debian packages

If you are not using the binary distribution (Windows Plattforms only), a pre-installed and running Perl interpreter with Perl version >=5.6 is always needed to run Big Sister. For the Big Sister server, additionally a webserver is required. You can certainly choose the webserver which suits your needs best. However, a suitable extension to the webserver configuration file is only supplied for the apache webserver (httpd).