In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LibreNMS on CentOS 7. For those of you who didn’t know, For those of you who didn’t know, LibreNMS is an open-source auto-discovering network monitoring tool for servers and network hardware. It supports a wide range of network hardware like Cisco, Juniper, Brocade, Foundry, HP, and operating systems including Linux and Windows. LibraNMS is a community-based fork of the Network monitoring tool “Observium“, released under GPLv3.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the LibreNMS network monitoring tool on a CentOS 7 server.
Prerequisites
- A server running one of the following operating systems: CentOS 7.
- It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
- SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
- A
non-root sudo useror access to theroot user. We recommend acting as anon-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.
LibreNMS Features
- Automatic discovery
- Customizable alerting
- API Access
- Billing system
- Automatic Updates
- Distributed Polling
- iOS and Android App
- Unix Agent
- And many more
Install LibreNMS on CentOS 7
Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.
yum clean all yum -y update
Step 2. Install the LAMP server.
A CentOS 7 LAMP stack server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here. Also, install the required PHP modules:
yum -y install php-gd php-imap php-ldap php-odbc php-pear php-xml php-xmlrpc php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-mssql php-snmp php-soap php-tidy curl curl-devel ImageMagick jwhois nmap mtr rrdtool net-snmp-utils vixie-cron php-mcrypt fping git pear install Net_IPv4-1.3.4 pear install Net_IPv6-1.2.2b2
Step 3. Installing LibreNMS.
First, Add a LibreNMS user:
useradd librenms -d /opt/librenms -M -r usermod -a -G librenms apache
Next, clone LibreNMS repo on /opt directory:
cd /opt/ git clone https://github.com/librenms/librenms.git librenms
Set the correct permission to the LibreNMS directory:
chown -R librenms:librenms /opt/librenms
Step 4. Configuring MariaDB for LibreNMS.
By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:
mysql_secure_installation
Configure it like this:
- Set root password? [Y/n] y - Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y - Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y - Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y - Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the LibreNMS. Run the following command:
mysql -u root -p
This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for LibreNMS installation:
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE librenms CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci; MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'librenms'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'PASSWORD'; MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON librenms.* TO 'librenms'@'localhost'; MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES; MariaDB [(none)]> exit
Next, open the MariaDB configuration file and add the following lines under [mysqld] section:
### nano /etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf innodb_file_per_table=1 sql-mode="" lower_case_table_names=0
Restart MariaDB for the changes to take effect:
systemctl restart mariadb
Step 5. Configure Apache web server for LibreNMS.
We will create an Apache virtual host for your LibreNMS website. First, create ‘/etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf’ file with using a text editor of your choice:
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/vhosts.conf IncludeOptional vhosts.d/*.conf
Next, create the virtual host:
mkdir /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/ nano /etc/httpd/vhosts.d/yourdomain.com.conf
Add the following lines:
<VirtualHost YOUR_SERVER_IP:80> ServerAdmin webmaster@yourdomain.com DocumentRoot /opt/librenms/html/ ServerName yourdomain.com ServerAlias www.yourdomain.com ErrorLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-error_log" CustomLog "/var/log/httpd/yourdomain.com-access_log" combined <Directory "/opt/librenms/html/"> DirectoryIndex index.html index.php Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride All Require all granted </Directory> </VirtualHost>
Save and close the file. Restart the apache service for the changes to take effect:
systemctl restart httpd.service
Step 6. Configure Firewall.
Allow apache through the firewall so that users can able to access the LibreNMS portal from an external machine:
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=80/tcp firewall-cmd --reload
Step 7. Accessing LibreNMS.
LibreNMS will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://yourdomain.com/ or http://your-server-ip/ and complete the required steps to finish the installation. If you are using a firewall, please open port 80 to enable access to the control panel.
Congratulations! You have successfully installed LibreNMS. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the LibreNMS network monitoring tool on CentOS 7 systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official LibreNMS website.
