7.3 Installing Sysmon

The following sections provide specifics on installing Sysmon.

7.3.1 Where to Place the Server

Because Sysmon will suppress notifications for any failed devices behind a single failed device, it is important to run the monitoring program somewhere that has a good view of the network. It would be a mistake to place the server four devices removed from the core of the network, especially if one of those devices tends to fail often. When one does fail, Sysmon will lose its view of the rest of the network. You would rather have the Sysmon server located as close to the core as possible, if not directly on the backbone. This way Sysmon will be able to give the most accurate report possible when something fails.

7.3.2 How to Install Sysmon

The installation for Sysmon is mostly straightforward. Download the latest version from http://www.sysmon.org/, then unpackage and build the software. There is one step that is out of the ordinary; you must change to the src directory before typing make :

 Solaris# gunzip -c sysmon-0.91.17.tar.gz  tar xvf -   Solaris# cd sysmon-0.91.17   Solaris# ./configure   Solaris# cd src   Solaris# make 

On Solaris, you may see a list of warnings for every file that is built. This is not a serious problem; it is the compiler complaining about the curses library. Sysmon uses curses to build a program that will display a nice list of unreachable hosts . As long as the files sysmon and sysmond are present, the build was successful:

 Solaris# file sysmon   sysmon:         ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dyn...   Solaris# file sysmond   sysmond:        ELF 32-bit MSB executable SPARC Version 1, dyn... 

At this point, you can install the software from a root account. By default, it will place the sysmon and sysmond programs in /usr/local/bin/ :

 Solaris# make install