Installation guide

This guide describes the installation and configuration of Kaa components on a single Linux node and in a cluster environment. This guide does not cover installation and configuration of third party systems (databases, web servers, etc) which is described in Development environment setup. If this is the first time you use Kaa, we recommend that you start the evaluation using Kaa Sandbox instead of attempting manual installation.

Installing Kaa from stable release

This section describes how to install Kaa by downloading an installation package, as opposed to building Kaa from source.

Supported OS

Kaa supports the following operation system families and provides an installation package for each of them.

• Ubuntu and other Debian systems
• Red Hat/CentOS/Oracle 5 or Red Hat 6 systems

System requirements

To use Kaa, your system must meet the following minimum system requirements.

• 64-bit OS
• 4 Gb RAM

Third party components

Kaa requires the following third party components to be installed and configured.

• Oracle JDK. Kaa has been tested on JDK 7. The framework has not been tested on JDK 8 yet.

• MongoDB 2.6.3. Kaa has been tested on the latest production release of MongoDB.

• PostgreSQL 9.3. Kaa has been tested on the latest production release of PostgreSQL.

• Tomcat 7. Kaa Admin UI has been tested on Tomcat 7.

• Zookeeper 3.4.6. Kaa requires ZooKeeper for coordination of server components.
  
  NOTE
  Kaa was designed to be independent from NoSQL databases.
  You can implement support of custom NoSQL database with little effort.
  Kaa is going to add support for popular NoSQL databases in the nearest releases.

Installation steps

To install Kaa on either Ubuntu/Debian systems or Red Hat/Red Hat 6/CentOS/Oracle 5 systems, perform the following steps.

Configuration overview

This section provides information on Kaa components configuration file locations and contents.

Each installed Kaa component stores configuration files in the /usr/lib/kaa-$component/conf folder. This folder contains Spring context, logging properties and one or more *.properties configuration files. All the database related properties are stored in the dao.properties file. All component specific properties are stored in the $component-server.properties file. Each property is documented with inline comments. Once reconfigured, a component requires a restart for the changes to take effect. You can find more detailed configuration instructions in the Single node setup and Cluster setup sections.

Database configuration

Kaa uses an SQL(relational) database for metadata and a NoSQL database for endpoint related information.

To configure an SQL database, edit /usr/lib/kaa-$component/conf/dao.properties where $component is control and operations.

To configure a NoSQL database, edit /usr/lib/kaa-$component/conf/common-dao-$nosql_db_provider_name.properties where $nosql_db_provider_name is one of supported NoSQL databases.

To switch between NoSQL databases, edit the nosql_db_provider_name parameter in /usr/lib/kaa-$component/conf/dao.properties.

Logging overview

This section provides information on Kaa components log files location and their configuration.

Each installed Kaa component stores log files in the /var/log/kaa folder. This folder normally contains logs from multiple components. Each component stores logs in the kaa-$component-server[.init].log files that are rotated daily. Logging for each component is configured in the  /usr/lib/kaa-$component/conf/log4j.xml file. Once reconfigured, a component requires a restart for the changes to take effect.

Configuring firewall port access

The following table provides information on what ports must be open for a single node setup and a cluster setup when the nodes are protected with a firewall.

Validating third party component configuration

Validate Oracle JDK installation

We assume that Oracle JDK is already installed.

You can check if Oracle JDK is installed by executing the following command:

As a result, you will receive the JDK version if it is installed.

Validate Postgresql and MongoDB configuration

We assume that the Postgresql and MongoDB servers are already installed.

The following command checks if the default database ports 5432 (postgresql) and 27017 (mongodb) are listening on network interfaces. If you have other ports configured for this purpose, replace 5432 and/or 27017 with your own ports.

As a result, you will receive a list of interfaces with the corresponding ports.

Specify Postgresql server configuration

The following procedure describes how to set a password for the default postgres user and create the Kaa database. If the password has already been set you can skip this procedure.

1. Connect to the postgresql-server via the psql utility by executing the following command.

2. Specify the password for the postgres user.
   The default password is admin. If you want to use another password, enter the new password and update the properties in the dao.properties files.

3. Connect to the postgresql-server via the psql utilityas described in step 1 and then create the Kaa database by executing the following command.

In case your postgresql server is installed on a separate node, you should bind it to the external ip/host (update the postgresql.conf file) and grant access for client hosts (update the pg_hba.conf file).

Single node setup

This section provides information on Kaa ecosystem setup on a single node. It means that all Kaa and third party components have to be installed on the same node.

The instructions in this section are based on the following assumptions.

• The ZooKeeper server is already installed.
• The external IP address is 192.160.10.172 (in a real-world configuration, it can be a public IP or a real host name).
• MongoDB is used as a NoSQL database for Kaa.

After the installation and validation processes are executed as described in the previous sections, you need to specify the configuration for components as described in this section.

Single node networking configuration

By default, Kaa components are configured to bind onto the local host. Thus, to connect to these components from endpoint applications, you need to reconfigure them for using an external IP or host name, (in our case, it's 192.168.10.172). For this purpose, perform the following steps.

1. Modify the netty_host property for the Bootstrap server config by executing the following command.

   The reconfigured netty_host to external IP address will look as follows:

   bootstrap-server.properties

2. Modify the channel_*_host properties for the Operations server config by executing the following command.

   As a result, the property file will include the following lines.

   operations-server.properties

3. Modify the app_base_url property for Admin UI by executing the following command.

   The reconfigured app_base_url with the external IP address will look as follows:

   admin-server.properties

4. Restart the Bootstrap server by executing the following command.

5. Restart the Operations server by executing the following command.

6. Restart the Admin UI server by executing the following command.

Single node database configuration

By default, Kaa components are configured in such a way that they are connected to databases on the local host with the default credentials. Execute the following steps to reconfigure the connection.

1. Modify the dao.properties file for the Operations and Control servers by executing the following commands.
2. Set the jdbc.host and jdbc.port for the postgresql connection and the servers for the mongodb connection.
3. Replace the default postgresql credentials with your own jdbc.username and jdbc.password.

In the following example, we left the default values in the database configuration file.

Starting Kaa

To activate the introduced changes, you should restart the Kaa components as follows:

1. Restart the Bootstrap server by executing the following command.

2. Restart the Operations server by executing the following command.

3. Restart the Admin UI server by executing the following command.

4. Restart the Control server by executing the following command.

After restarting all the components, you can access Admin UI at the app_base_url specified during the single node networking configuration.

Cluster Setup

This section provides information on the Kaa cluster setup process and Kaa nodes configuration. It is assumed that you are using MongoDB as a NoSQL database for Kaa.

Let's consider a Kaa cluster example with five nodes as in the following picture.

The following table provides general information on Kaa cluster nodes from our example. We use the following range of private IP addresses: 192.168.10.172 - 192.168.10.176. In your own configuration these addresses may be different.

Kaa cluster nodes table

You can see that we have dedicated two nodes for the Control server where one is primary (Master) and the other is secondary (Slave). Within the Control server installation, Admin UI component will also be installed.

The Operations and Bootstrap servers will be installed on the remaining three nodes.

ZooKeeper setup

Before starting the Kaa cluster setup, you need to set up the ZooKeeper server on several nodes of your cluster. It is preferable to use an odd number of nodes for this purpose. In our example, it is enough to set up the ZooKeeper server on three nodes, but we will use all five nodes.

1. Install the ZooKeeper on each target node by either using the package manager or downloading the ZooKeeper from the home page zookeeper.apache.org.

2. Set each ZooKeeper node's ID in the myid file.
   In our example, we use a sequential number of the node. You can find this file in the /etc/zookeeper/conf directory and set the ID by executing the following command.

3. Add all ZooKeeper servers to the /etc/zookeeper/conf/zoo.cfg file.
   The following code block provide a list of ZooKeeper  servers from our example.

4. Start the ZooKeeper server by executing the following command on the corresponding node.

5. To view the ZooKeeper server status, execute the following command on the corresponding node.
   If the command is executed successfully, you will receive the ZooKeeper server status.

Networking configuration

By default, Kaa components are configured to bind onto the local host. For a cluster configuration, you need to replace your default host parameters to external ones.

For this purpose, for both Control servers, replace the network parameters for the Control server and Admin UI components with the corresponding IPs: 192.168.10.172/192.168.10.173. To achieve this, proceed as follows:

1. Modify the thrift_host property for the Control server config by executing the following command.

2. Modify the app_base_url and control_thrift_host properties for Admin UI config by executing the following command.

For the remaining three nodes, replace the network parameters for the Operations and Bootstrap components with the corresponding IPs: 192.168.10.174/192.168.10.175/192.168.10.176. To achieve this, proceed as follows:

1. Modify thrift_host and channel_*_host properties for the Operations server config by executing the following command.

2. Modify the thrift_host and netty_host properties for the Bootstrap server config by executing the following command.

Database configuration

This section describes the databases configuration for Kaa components. The section does not describe the databases installation procedure. In our example scenario, we installed the MongoDB and Postgresql databases on the same Kaa cluster nodes. For the Postgresql database, the configuration procedure is the same as that for the single node installation, and you can use the procedure described in the Single node database configuration section.

For the MongoDB we decided to use the MongoDB Sharded Cluster instead of a single node database. Therefore, we installed MongoDB Config Servers on the Control Server Master, Control Server Slave, and Operations Server Node 1 nodes (one server per node) and MongoDB Routing Server on each node of the Kaa cluster. You can find more detailed information on shared clusters on the official site: Sharded Cluster.

To set the MongoDB configuration, execute the following steps.

1. On each Control server node, modify the servers property. In our scenario, it will be the external IP and port of Control Servers (192.168.10.172:27017,192.168.10.173:27017).

2. Perform the same action on each Operations server node (192.168.10.174:27017,192.168.10.175:27017,192.168.10.176:27017).

Starting Kaa cluster

After all the configuration processes are complete, start/restart the installed Kaa component (see Kaa cluster nodes table) on each Kaa cluster node.

To activate your changes, restart the Kaa-Admin component as follows:

Starting Web UI

Further reading

Use the following guides and references to make the most of Kaa.

Copyright © 2014, CyberVision, Inc.