Progress Report: OpenNMS under FreeBSD

[Dennis Glatting]

I have OpenNMS-1812 running under FreeBSD 8.2, specifically within a 
VirtualBox instance running FreeBSD 8.2 amd64 itself running under FreeBSD 
8.2 amd64. There were a lot of issues.

By "running" I mean:

  * A PostgreSQL database is built, running, and initialized,
  * OpenNMS starts and displays its web page, and
  * I can log into that web page with wonderfulness displayed
    on my browser.

PostgreSQL and OpenNMS seem happy. However, I have not yet configured 
OpenNMS to talk to any devices.

Issues included:

  * Sometimes you have to specify JAVA_HOME in the environment
    and other times you MUST NOT.
  * I didn't see any indication of what version of PostgreSQL
    to install so I mistakenly installed 9.1. I later backed
    down to 8.4.
  * OpenNMS requires UTF8 for PostgreSQL but the default
    install does not include it. (BTW, I rebuilt the database
    many times.)
  * I had to suck instrumentationLogReader-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar out
    of a Linux RPM because the OpenNMS install script could not
    download it from anywhere.
  * I had to set the Java proxies for my site.
  * Many OpenNMS files, such as .xml and .sql files, install
    with the execute bit set. I'm not sure if that is my fault
    or the install process' fault. Nonetheless, it shouldn't
    be that way.
  * Creation and permissions of PostgreSQL entities wasn't
    obvious to me. Where to change the OpenNMS files to
    alter their passwords also wasn't obvious.
  * I did not like the default installation point for the
    PostgreSQL database and moved it to /var/db.
  * I do not like where OpenNMS installs its log files. I prefer
    to create something like /var/log/nms. That said, for now
    I'm not going to touch them and hope they are nicely managed.

Some of these issues stem from the fact that I am not a Java guy, I am not 
a PostgreSQL guy, I preferred my database not to be resident on my NMS, 
my network doesn't NAT for non-interfacing hosts (by design), and 
virtualization, which itself was a non-issue.

BTW, this is one of two sites I plan to deploy OpenNMS under similar 
construct.