Debian packaging of NAV

What is NAV?

NAV is short for Network Administration Visualized and is NTNU's self developed network management solution. NAV is up and running on all four Norwegian universities and 10 colleges. NAV is licenced under the GNU General Public License.

Development of NAV version 3 started in 2002, and is now in a stabilize process. These pages describes the situation for a Debian package of NAV 3. This work was initially sponsored by UNINETT, and we hope that others will participate in making NAV available and easily installable for the Debian operating system.

NAV's official webpages: http://metanav.uninett.no/.

Status of the Debian package

Debian Lenny

A package of 3.8.4 is available and considered releasable. Add the following lines:

deb http://pkg-nav.alioth.debian.org/debian/ lenny local

to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run apt-get update to update your package lists.

Also make sure that you have the contrib and non-free sections present in your sources.list-file:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

After you have edited your /etc/apt/sources.list and updated your package lists. If you want the NAV package to automatically initialize a database for you, make sure your debconf priority is set to medium (run dpkg-reconfigure debconf). Now run apt-get install nav and follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/nav/README.Debian to complete the installation. Please report bugs and indistinctness to me per email (werner @ debian . org).

Debian Etch

Please note that security support for Debian Etch was terminated on February 15th 2010. You should strongly consider upgrading from Etch to Lenny. We have documented an upgrade path, but this "guide" does not take other packages/services into consideration.

A package of 3.5.5 is available and considered releasable. Note that security support for Debian Etch ended 15. february 2010. Add the following lines:

deb http://pkg-nav.alioth.debian.org/debian/ etch local
deb http://backports.org/debian/ etch-backports main contrib non-free

to your /etc/apt/sources.list and run aptitude update to update your package lists (and aptitude install debian-backports-keyring to install the keyring for the backports.org-archive).

Also make sure that you have the contrib and non-free sections present in your sources.list-file:

deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

After you have edited your /etc/apt/sources.list and updated your package lists. If you want the NAV package to automatically initialize a database for you, make sure your debconf priority is set to medium (run dpkg-reconfigure debconf). Now run aptitude install nav and follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/nav/README.Debian to complete the installation. Please report bugs and indistinctness to me per email (werner @ debian . org).

TODO

Everyone is more than welcome to contribute to decrese the number of items on this TODO-list. :)

Find the correct way to specify CLASSPATH for the jvm-calls, and use this instead of the hack which adds /usr/share/java/*.jar to the CLASSPATH. (java -Djava.ext.dirs=/usr/share/java is probably better, but will include too many .jar's)
Improve the NAV Debian package to be FHS-compatible.
Improve the NAV Debian package to follow the Debian Policy.
And finally .. upload NAV to the official Debian repository.

If you know of any items that are missing from this list, please send me an email (werner at debian dot org).

Finished work

Set up logrotation.
Make the cricket-part of NAV to use the cricket Debian package.
Try to make some automation around the creation of the NAV database.
Switch to the new python-pysnmp2-package of PySNMP (a patch for NAV that makes NAV use the stable PySNMP is available from upstream).
The NAV package in the sarge-repository on pkg-nav.alioth.debian.org is now built and does run quite ok with free Java alternatives. :)

Dependencies that are packaged and uploaded to Debian

These Debian pacakges are maintained by Morten Werner Forsbring. If someone wants to contribute, please send me an email (werner @ debian . org), and we'll work something out!

The NAV Debian package

NAV is packaged for Debian, but the package is far from perfect. If you want to contribute with your time to make this package better, please send me an email (werner @ debian . org) and we'll work something out!!! :)