Install OTbase Network Discovery on RedHat

Installation of OTbase Discovery is achieved via a Terminal command that also downloads all its dependencies.

System requirements

OTbase Discovery runs on RedHat 8 and higher.

The following requirements must be met:

• A RedHat 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 Discovery on Linux you simply need to run a single command which will then install all dependencies and the Discovery itself. The command is the following:

> sudo yum localinstall <package path>

The package path is the location of the downloaded OTBase Discovery Linux package. For example if your file is saved on the root node:

> sudo yum localinstall ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.0_amd64.rpm

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 downgrade which changes the command to this:

> sudo yum localinstall downgrade ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.0_amd64.rpm

Port configuration

Since the Linux installation is headless, all ports are preconfigured on a default installation:

• 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. If you change it you then have to restart the Discovery service.

If you would like to change the ports on installation you have to add some 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 yum localinstall ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.3_amd64.rpm

Installs OTbase 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 yum localinstall ~/otbase-discovery-service_V14.3_amd64.rpm

Configuration of OTbase Discovery

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