Installing OpenQRM on Ubuntu 9.10

Posted by Rob May 27, 2010, under Technological Prowess | No Comments

Seeing a virtual machine purring along is a thing of beauty. OpenQRM is a fantastic web based package for managing your system, private cloud and virtualization technologies. It integrates seamlessly with both KVM and XEN.

So, here's a brief HOW TO for installing OpenQRM on Ubuntu Server 9.10. This HOW TO assumes you've already installed the virtualization platform of your choice, either XEN or KVM.

Step 1: Installing Prerequisites

Boy there are quite a few of these for OpenQRM so let's take care of that first:

apt-get install php5-mysql libphp-adodb mysql-server mysql-client syslinux tftpd-hpa dhcp3-server nagios-images nagios-plugins nmap libxml-simple-perl open-iscsi aoetools expect puppetmaster subversion bind9

This will install everything you need to run OpenQRM. Nifty no? You may not end up using all these packages but OpenQRM requires them to at least be present before it'll install properly.

One note, and it's an important one - OpenQRM by default expects a blank root password for Mysql so don't set one or if you already have a root password, change it for the moment to blank.

Step 2: Getting the package

Head over to www.openqrm.com and grab the latest package. It's available in both Source and .deb format but I've chosen the deb as it's much simpler to get going. It's about 64mb in size so not exactly terribly huge.

As of writing, the latest version was 4.6.

Step 3: Installing!

Installation at this point couldn't be simpler:

dpkg -i openqrm_4.6-ubuntu1_amd64.deb

In my case, this did just fine.

The installation will ask you for details of your self-signed certificate. Fill these in but keep this step in mind because there are sometimes issues that will cause you to get stuck on Step 3 of the setup wizard. If this happens, you'll need to kill off OpenQRM by going:

apt-get remove openqrm

and re-running your dpkg -i command to start it up again. This time, don't enter any values for your certificate.

Step 4: Configuring

Head on over to https://[your-ip]/openqrm and login using:

Username: openqrm

Password: openqrm

Configure the cloud, virtualization and so on to taste.

Troubleshooting

Q) Help! My wizard gets stuck on step 3! The mysql database is created but nothing happens after that! What do?

A) You must kill off OpenQRM again and this time, don't enter any details in the certificate creation step. Please don't forget to go into MySQL and run a "drop database openqrm;" before reinstalling. Follow the instructions in Step 3 and you'll be fine.

Q) Help, something else is broken! How can I see what's going on?

A) OpenQRM uses /var/log/messages to store records of pretty much everything so use that as your first point of reference. If you can't get things sorted there, ask on the SourceForge site.

Conclusion

That's it - all done. I hope you enjoy using OpenQRM as much as I am