Installing OTbase Discovery on Windows

Installation of OTbase Discovery is achieved via a Windows installer that guides the user through various dialogs for picking a desired program folder etc.

System requirements

OTbase Discovery runs on Windows 7 and higher.

For Windows 7, the following requirements must be met:

• SP1 installed
• KB3033929 installed (Driver signature support for Npcap)
• KB2533623 or monthly KB4457144 installed (Python multiprocessing support)
• Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable installed (api-ms-win-crt-runtime-l1-1-0.dll needed).

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).

Interactive installation

After launching the installation program, follow these steps to install OTbase Discovery on your computer.

Stopping an existing OTbase Discovery service and configuration client

When installing an update, the existing OTbase Discovery service must be stopped, and a running configuration client must be terminated. The installer will do that for you during the installation.

Accept the license agreement

Select a program folder

Specify port numbers if you want to use OTbase Discovery as a Netflow/SFlow collector

OTbase Discovery can collect data flow information from your switches and routers if they support the Netflow or SFlow services. In this case you also need to tell your switch or router to direct such traffic to the computer on which you install OTbase Discovery.

Note: You cannot change port numbers or activation settings once that the installation procedure is finished. This means that if you ever need to make changes to these settings, you must re-install OTbase Discovery.

If your switches and routers don't support Netflow/SFlow or you don't want to use it, de-select the checkboxes.

Select a port for the REST API

OTbase Discovery comes with a REST API for script based configuration, which is particularly useful if you are running dozens or hundreds of OTbase Discovery nodes. You can specify the TCP port number for REST API access in this dialog.

If you don't plan to use the REST API please uncheck the checkbox.

Select the service port

You can specify a custom port on which the OTbase Discovery configuration client connects with the server. However this is reserved for future use. Simply acknowledge the default port number.

Complete the installation procedure

Your OTbase Discovery installation is now ready and you can launch the configuration client right away.

Script-Based Installation (Silent Installation)

If you want to install OTbase Discovery using a script (for example controlled by Microsoft SCCM), then call the installer with the command line option /S for "silent", here we use a capital S.

Please note that the script needs to be executed by a user with administrator privileges.

Below is a list of additional parameters you can use for script-based/ silent installations.

Note: Stopping the OTbase Discovery client and service before installing or rebooting the device afterwards if needed is not done by the installer in silent mode! This has to be taken care off by the script calling the installer.