HOWTO play with NAL using LivEPICS

First of all download LivEPICS.fc5 NAGIOS v1.0

then you could make a CD (by K3B, Nero etc.) or if you don't want burn a CD using a linux pc you can do the following steps:

Get qemu from here: http://dag.wieers.com/packages/qemu. Take the rpm for your distro.

How to run qemu (see also man qemu):

qemu -m 256 -cdrom .LivEPICS.fc5.Nagios.v.1.0.iso
qemu -m 256 -full-screen -cdrom livecd.iso

Escape full screen in qemu with ALT+CTRL+f
Or alternatively you can use VMware Player or VMware Server

Alternatively, in case you has burned a CD; put it into your PC, set the BIOS to boot from CD.

Booting the CD using the default boot, and at the second boot CD menu select the option 1 and press enter. Someone PC could give problems to boot up, in that case you should find a workaround selection using other options (portable PC may should have problem on video card drivers... Hp Compaq nx500 works perfectly).

At login sign-in with "adios" user and "password "livepics"

The default network configuration is DHCP based; in case you have to use a fixed IP please setup it by "system-config-network" by root (password "livepics").

The default keyboard is US, please use "system-config-keyboard" by root if doesn't match with the yours.

Then "startx" by the shell; the KDE 3.5 starts (in case of problem try with system-config-display by root).

kde35Desktop

Open Firefox and have a look to the bookmarks, you can read everything offline document necessary to use EPICS.

FirefoxHomePage

Open a terminal, and make the following command to start the "example" application:

>cd ./top/iocBoot/iocexample/
>../../bin/linux-x86/example st.cmd

into the epics IOC shell verfy the loaded records:

epics>dbl

a complete list of 11 records has to showed, as follow:

IOCExampleBoot

Now from Firefox toolbar press "NagiosMonitor"; the user name is "nagiosadmin" and password is "livepics".
You will be directed to http://localhost/nagios.

NagiosHomePage

Looking on the left black menu select "status map", you should see:

NagiosStatusMap

Looking on the left black menu select "service detail", you should see:

NagiosServiceDetails

Selecting a service you should see the "alert histogram" i.e. to aiExample record:

NagiosAlertHistogram

Theare a lot of other interesting feature that comes from free using NAGIOS, looking around you should find a lot yourself.

At this time Ralph Lange has realized a test to NAL at Bessy. A great aknowlegment to him, he has supported me since the idea of use Nagios born in my mind.

Thank you for your attention!
Please, give me a your feedback, and fell free to drop me an email, I'll be happy to continue to work on this idea if someome is interested to use it.

Mauro.