Looper - Alert Routing System.
Installing Looper
First, get the latest looper tarball from the downloads section and untar the distribution:
Answer the questions that follow, which are the target installation directory and path to your perl interpreter. Refer to the section below about the Netcool notes.
Note: The installer goes through building all the Perl modules and FreeTDS (for netcool support). You must have a set of compiler tools (gcc, make, autoconf etc.) installed. Also note that the compiler must be the same one you used to build Perl. This is a Perl 5 quirk; if you built it with gcc, then then gcc should be on the machine. This isn't usually a problem on most machines, except on some Solaris machines where Perl comes standard; these machines have Perl built with cc (and not gcc).
The installer will then go ahead and create the target directory and copy all the necessary files there. It then proceeds to build the necessary perl modules and dependencies. Also note that the input /out modules in the modules/input and modules/output subdirectories expect the Perl path to be /usr/bin/perl. If this is not your perl path then either edit the files and chage the path (all modules); or better still, make a symbolic link to your perl interpreter in /usr/bin.
The installation script logs all the build output into files in the /tmp directory. After the install, check the files for errors. If you don't see any, all is well. Go to the next step (configuring Looper).
Netcool notes
As of version 0.4, no Netcool components are needed on the machine. The modules use the FreeTDS libraries to handle all the communication. The only thing you must remember is to copy the interfaces file from your Netcool installation to the freetds directory under the Looper install dir.
You can test the Netcool modules by executing them from the command line. The input executable is stored in the modules/input directory and is called netcool_in. Run the program and type the following (to feed into STDIN):
Netcool notes for previous versions of Looper (0.3.4 and below)
You must have the netcool core libraries installed for the modules to work. Linux Netcool installs have a quirk in the locales.dat file in the $OMNIHOME/platform/linux2x86/locales directory. You must and an entry in the [linux] for en_US.
Your $OMNIHOME environment variable should also be correctly set for this to work.
You can test the netcool_out module by executing it from the command line. The executable is stored in the modules/output directory and is called netcool_out. Run the program and type the following (to feed into STDIN):
Go to the Looper Event / Alert System home page: looper.sf.net
Mohit Muthanna [mohit AT muthanna DOT com]
$ tar -zxvf looper-0.3.tar.gz
Change to the looper directory and run the installation script as root:
$ cd looper
$ ./install.sh
server=NCOMS
username=root
password=
sybasehome=/opt/looper/freetds
^D (that's control-d)
Replace the above with the info related to your netcool install. If you see a list of alerts in token value pairs, then all is good. If you get a core dump (segmentation fault), check your locales.dat file in freetds.
server=NCOMS
username=root
password=
omnihome=/opt/Omnibus
platform=linux2x86
configure
Replace the above with the info related to your netcool install.
If you don't get a core dump, everything's good; else check the locales.dat file and your $OMNIHOME variable.