How to Install NetApp DFM on Ubuntu

NetApp provide a Linux version of their DFM/Operations Manager product, but they only support certain versions of Suse and RedHat distros. I run Ubuntu, but I figured could port the installation across. How hard could it be?

Not too hard, as it turns out. Here’s how to do it.

Getting at the RPM

The installation package is a self-extracting executable. It will fail to install because it checks which version of operating system you’re using. It also wants to use RPM, but Ubuntu uses debian format packages.

We can work around this, but first we need to get at the RPM itself. This requires a bit of a hack.

Run the installer package, similar to this:

sudo ./dfmsetup-3-8-linux.sh

This will extract its files into /tmp/dfmsetup-<random_characters>. We want to pull the rug out from under the program before it fails, so cd into this directory, and when you see more than one file, do this:

mv dfmsetup.zip ..

Then, when the install fails, the automatic cleanup part will fail to delete this temp directory.

Grab the RPM

You should now be able to see three files in the directory:

-rw------- 1 root root     15412 2009-06-26 13:38 validkey
-rw------- 1 root root 342902837 2009-06-26 13:38 NTAPdfm-3.8-6232.i386.rpm
-rwx------ 1 root root     20470 2009-06-26 13:38 dfmsetup.sh*

Now we can play with the RPM. Grab it, and move it somewhere you can manipulate it. I’ll use /usr/local/src for this example.

Convert the file with alien

We now want to convert the file using the alien utility. If you don’t have it, install it with apt-get or synaptic.

Converting the file is easy:

alien NTAPdfm-3.8-6232.i386.rpm

This will create a file named ntapdfm_3.8-6233_i386.deb, which is a debian package format equivalent of the source RPM.

Install the package

Now we install the shiny new debian package, just like any other:

dpkg -i ntapdfm_3.8-6233_i386.deb

This puts the software into /opt/NTAPdfm and sets up a few other files for us, like an init script in /etc/init.d/NTAPdfm

Configure the package

We have to do a few things manually, because we haven’t had the benefit of the RPM postinstall scripts. Happily, there isn’t much required.

Firstly, we need to edit /opt/NTAPdfm/bin/vars.sh to set some path information. Edit the file and set:

BASENAME=/opt/NTAPdfm

Now we can run the auto-configure part of the installation:

dfm service setup -l <license_key>

Obviously, you’ll need your DFM license key. You should see output like this:

Setting up sql ...
Starting SQL ...
Setting up DBA user ...
Setting up transaction log management...
Defining SQL schema ...
Defining SQL Views ...
Defining SQL debug procedures ...
Setting up DFM user ...
Creating or updating sample backup schedules and throttles.
Stopping SQL ...
SQL Anywhere Stop Server Utility Version 10.0.1.3830
Enabled Operations Manager license.

We’re almost there.

Set up the webserver

The webserver configuration for RedHat uses ‘nobody’ for the group, but under Ubuntu, the group needs to be ‘nogroup’.

Edit the file /opt/NTAPdfm/conf/httpd.conf.tmpl, somewhere near this bit:

<IfModule prefork.c>
    # UNIX stuff
    User            @@USERNAME@@
    Group            nogroup
    LockFile        "log/httpd.lock"

Start DFM

dfm service start

You should now be able to browse to http://localhost:8080, or whatever the address of your server is.

Congratulations! You’re running DFM on Ubuntu. I’ve tested this on Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04, so you should be ok there. 8.10 will probably be fine as well.

Let me know if you try this on any other flavours.

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4 Comments

  1. Thanks for this, was very useful.

    Also useful to note that as the install script checks for a specific string in “/etc/redhat-release” or equivalent to determine the OS, a quick cheat for RHEL clone OS users (e.g CentOS) you can temporarily add the equivalent string e.g. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5” to the file get through the OS check.

  2. Thank You very much. I knew there was a way to do this, just wasn’t able to figure it out. Got DFM 4.0 going on Fedora 13.

    Appreciate the help.

  3. You’re welcome, Steven. Glad it’s working for you!

  4. @Veronica: couldn’t you just use the “-o” option to skip the OS check?

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