Installing Required OS and Software
Please note that this only describes a "fresh install". For upgrades, please refer to the Paragon Active Assurance Upgrade Guide.
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Install a clean Ubuntu 22.04 server.
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The system user name does not matter, except that the name "netrounds" is not allowed since PostgreSQL creates a user with that name (as described in this paragraph).
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Install only standard components (do not change the default selection).
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The following disk partitioning is recommended, especially for snapshot backups (but it is up to you as a user to decide):
- Recommended partitioning for lab setup:
/: Whole disk, ext4.
- Recommended partitioning for production setup:
/: 10% of disk space, ext4./var: 10% of disk space, ext4./var/lib/netrounds/rrd(this includes TimescaleDB if you make use of that technology): 80% of disk space, ext4.
- No encryption
- Recommended partitioning for lab setup:
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Set the time zone to UTC, for example as follows:
sudo timedatectl set-timezone Etc/UTC
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Set all locales to
en_US.UTF-8.-
One way to do this is to manually edit the file
/etc/default/locale. Example:LANG=en_US.UTF-8 LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
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Make sure the following line is NOT commented out in the file
/etc/locale.gen:en_US.UTF-8 UTF-8
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Regenerate the locale files to make sure selected language is available:
sudo apt-get install locales sudo locale-gen
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Install NTP:
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First disable
timedatectl:sudo timedatectl set-ntp no
Disable
systemd-timesyncd.To disable the
systemd-timesyncdservice:Run the following command to check whether the
systemd-timesyncdservice (minimalistic service to synchronize local time with NTP servers) is running or not.systemctl status systemd-timesyncdIf the service is activated, proceed to Step b.
If the response is Failed to disable unit: Unit file systemd-timesyncd.service does not exist, then proceed with NTP installation.
Run the following commands:
systemctl disable systemd-timesyncdsystemctl stop systemd-timesyncd
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Now you can run the NTP installation:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install ntp
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Make sure that the configured NTP servers are reachable:
ntpq -np
The "reach" value should normally be "all ones" expressed in octal.
(In the output, the "reach" value for the NTP servers is an octal value indicating the outcome of the last eight NTP transactions. If all eight were successful, the value will be octal 377 [= binary 0b11111111]. However, when you have just installed NTP, it is likely that fewer than eight NTP transactions have occurred, so that the value will be smaller: one of 1, 3, 7, 17, 37, 77, or 177 if all transactions were successful.)
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Install PostgreSQL, set up a user for Control Center, and create databases:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install postgresql sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE ROLE netrounds WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'netrounds' SUPERUSER LOGIN;" sudo -u postgres psql -c "CREATE DATABASE netrounds OWNER netrounds ENCODING 'UTF8' TEMPLATE 'template0';"
Using an external PostgreSQL server is not recommended.
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Install and configure an email server.
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Control Center will send emails to users:
- when they are invited to an account,
- when sending email alarms (i.e. if email rather than SNMP is used for this purpose), and
- when sending periodic reports.
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Run the command
sudo apt-get install postfix
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For a simple setup where postfix can send directly to the destination email server, you can set General type of mail configuration to "Internet Site", and System mail name can usually be left as-is. Otherwise, postfix needs to be configured according to the environment. For guidance, refer to the official Ubuntu documentation at ubuntu.com/server/docs/mail-postfix.
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