Install OTbase Discovery on Debian

Installation of OTbase Discovery is achieved via a Terminal command which will then download all dependencies.

System requirements

OTbase Discovery runs on Debian 11 and higher.

The following requirements must be met:

• A Debian 64-bit Linux system
• Mandatory packages: openssl, tcpdump, lsof, binutils, systemd (These will automatically be installed if you follow this document)

The amount of memory that is needed mostly depends on the number of devices that are probed by the node. If this number is low, such as a couple hundred endpoints, you will barely notice OTbase Discovery consuming memory, and the probing will often be completed within a couple of minutes, if not seconds. On the other end of the spectrum, there are installations where one Discovery node probes many thousand endpoints, which will then require a dedicated machine with a decent amount of RAM (16+ GB).

Installation

To install OTbase Discovery on Linux, all you need to do is run this single command which will then install all dependencies along with the OTbase Discovery service. The <package path> refers to the location of the downloaded OTBase Discovery Linux package.

> sudo apt install <package path>

 For example:

> sudo apt install ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.3_amd64.deb

If you ever need to perform a downgrade of OTbase Discovery, you need to add an option to allow apt to downgrade the dependencies.

The flag for this is --allow-downgrades which changes the command to this:

> sudo apt install --allow-downgrades ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.0_amd64.deb

Port configuration

Since the Linux install is headless all ports are pre-configured for default installations.

• Discovery service: 44461
• Rest: 443
• Netflow: 2055
• sFlow: 6343

This information can also be found and changed in the file /etc/default/otbase-discovery-service after the installation. Any changes to this file requires a restart to the Discovery service.

Ports can also be set during the installation by adding variables to the install command. These variables are:

• OTBASE_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_PORT=<port>
  
• OTBASE_DISCOVERY_REST_PORT=<port>
• OTBASE_DISCOVERY_NFLOW_PORT=<port>
• OTBASE_DISCOVERY_SFLOW_PORT=<port>

For example:

> sudo OTBASE_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_PORT=12345 apt install ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.0_amd64.deb

Installs Discovery with the service port set to 12345.

Multiple variables can be chained together by using a space as a separator between them.

> sudo OTBASE_DISCOVERY_SERVICE_PORT=12345 OTBASE_DISCOVERY_REST_PORT=10443 apt install ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.0_amd64.deb

Configuration of OTbase Discovery

All configuration of Discovery is done via the OTbase Discovery REST API, which you can read here.