I am forever amazed at how documentation on how to install products on Linux which were primarily made for Windows is sufficiently lacking in every respect. Okay, I'm not that amazed. But I came into the Unix world through the back door - I started with Novell NetWare 3.x and Windows for Workgroups 3.51 (remember those!) and then meandered through the world of Windows NT Server and found myself in the networking world of Cisco routers and such.
Then, a few years later, I met Unix. I can't say it was love at first sight, in fact it was more like chaos and insanity, but now, Unix and I, we understand each other.
So today I was figuring out how to install the server agent on the APC Smart UPS SC 1500 I just bought. It's a RHEL ES 3 server with a serial interface, so I connected it and didn't expect any sort of miracle that the server would know it had something new attached. It didn't, of course.
Unix agent, I told myself, I need to find the Unix agent. I found this in the instructions on how to install on Unix - basically I needed to find the RPM.
Now, of course, that I'm looking for the info I found a handy text doc on how to do this:
RPM is on the cdrom.
rpm -i pbeagent-7.0.4-114.i386.rpm
will get the agent installed.
The install puts a file PBEAgent in /etc/init.d - this is what I used to figure out where the installation was.
Agent installs to /opt/APC/PowerChuteBusinessEdition (of course! that's so obvious!)
then by chance I found this file:
config.sh
which I thought I'd run just to see what happens.
Turns out, this is a good thing, because I chose "simple" for the install and it prompted me to create username/password, select the com port (I guessed it was com1).
Then, I wondered, what next?
Ah, install the Windows server software. Somehow, autotragically, the server s/w install discovered my server running the powerchute agent. Somehow it's all working, and as with a lot of windows originated software, how is still a mystery.
