Quick install: using a Virtual Machine (VM)

Introduction

FreeNAC is quite complex, and needs a machine with GNU/Linux and many OpenSource source tools installed.

To get you started quickly with FreeNAC, we have built a Virtual Appliance (also called a Virtual Machine, VM) with Linux, the modules needed, and FreeNAC installed in a 'demo mode'.

The VM is ideal if you just want to test FreeNAC, or feel daunted by the length installation documentation for FreeNAC.

On the other hand, the VM is only updated every few months, and its slow to download.

There are two datasets included with the VM: "nacdemo" contains an example that should help to understand the GUI and what information FreeNAC stores, whereas "opennac" is an empty dataset ready for productive use.

The FreeNAC version included in the VM is the latest stable branch at the time the VM was created, from the Subversion repository.

Installing the VM

  1. Ensure you have a Vmware product to start VMs.
    i.e. VMware Workstation or the free VMware Player or Vmware Server . For production use, consider Vmware ESX.
  2. Download the file FreeNAC_VM_from SourceForge (note: its a large file, several hundred MB).
  3. Uncompress it into a folder where your VMs are normally stored
  4. The VM is configured to use "bridged mode", which is fine to be actively running in your network since it needs to receive packets on a dedicated IP address.
  5. Start the VM and ignore errors you might receive on startup, and log in as freenac:freenac for 2.2RC4 or root:freenac for prior releases of the VM.

  6. The VM will try to get an IP address via DHCP, which you can see with 

    ifconfig -a

Optional changes to the VM:

  1. If you need to configure a static IP address or change the network settings, execute 'yast network' (Suse) or 'vi /etc/network/interfaces (Ubuntu).
  2. The keyboard layout in the VM is Swiss German, to set it to your preference,
    Suse: YaST -> Hardware -> Keyboard Settings .
    Ubuntu: sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow console-setup
  3. Timezone
      dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
  4. To get the latest revision (bug fixes) from the release, in the directory /opt/nac just type 'svn update'.

Connect to the Web Interface

  1. To connect to the Web GUI, open your favorite web browser and type in the address bar the IP of your VM (which you seen with 'ifconfig' above).
  2. If the web page is displayed correctly, then the VM is running, on the network, and Apache is running fine too.
  3. On the web page there should be a summary of documentation, links to the web gui and a copy of instructions on this page.
  4. Click on the "Web GUI" link. Its features are described in the User Guide .
    Note that this interface is accessing the "opennac" database, which is empty after a fresh VM install.

Install the Windows Interface

The Windows GUI is the primary, recommended, method of administering FreeNAC .

Please follow the instructios in the section Installing the Windows Interface.

See the Users Guide for a description of how to use the Windows interface.

Connecting Switches to FreeNAC

Point your switch(es) to the FreeNAC VM (see the technical Guide (http://freenac.net/en/techguide).

You may also need to define your SNMP RO/RW communities in your switches. Some scripts (namely cron_restart_port.php) require to know these communities in order to operate properly. Once you've defined your SNMP communities on your switches, edit as root the file /opt/nac/etc/config.inc, find the lines:

## SNMP communities
$snmp_ro="PASSWORD2";            # maybe public
$snmp_rw="PASSWORD3";            # very private
$router_ro="PASSWORD4";		  #For router_mac_ip script. If empty, use snmp_ro defined above

and change PASSWORD2, PASSWORD3 and PASSWORD4 accordingly.

Once you've done that, check for the existence of the file /opt/nac/bin/cron_restart_port.pid and if it exists, delete it

rm /opt/nac/bin/cron_restart_port.pid

Observe syslog and play with the GUIs.

 

Using FreeNAC in 802.1x mode

to do