The following operating system requirements must be met before installing the Acoustic™ Tealeaf CX Passive Capture Application.
The CX Passive Capture Application (PCA) is considered a network appliance software, like a network switch, that can be installed on a supported Linux™ platform. The software is designed to run in a dedicated environment to capture and process a high volume of network packets. As such, it is the only application software that must own the Linux server. It is not meant to be shared with any other general applications.
You must have Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) installed before you begin installing CX Passive Capture Application.
Supported operating system distributions for CX PCA Builds
Note: If your CX PCA server is running a build that is earlier than build 3502, it is recommended to upgrade to build 3502 or later. Before you upgrade to CX PCA build 3502 or later, you must upgrade the operating system on your CX PCA server to a distribution of Linux that is supported by the CX PCA.
At the time of this publication, the following distributions of Linux are compatible with the CX PCA:
- RHEL 5.x
- RHEL 6.x
- RHEL 7.x
- SLES 11.x
Note: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 uses the same installation package and process as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.
Depending on the type of operating system, more installation might be required. Review all of the following requirements.
Supported operating system distributions for Packet Forwarder
The Packet Forwarder software can be installed to systems with the following operating systems:
- RHEL 5.x
- RHEL 6.x
- RHEL 7.x
- SLES 11.x
Note: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 uses the same packet-forwarder installation package and process as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6. In this scenario, use tealeaf-pca-<nnnn>-<rrr>.RHEL6.i386.rpm for the installation package.
Depending on the type of operating system, more installation might be required. Review all of the following requirements.
Disable SELinux
Before you install the CX Passive Capture Application, SELinux must be disabled through the operating system.
The security enhancement features of Red Hat Linux are not compatible with the CX Passive Capture Application. Multiple system settings are not allowed in SELinux mode, and the syslog system is not available, which prevents the PCA capture.log
from working.
- If SELinux is enabled and the tealeaf script is used to start capture, a warning is displayed.
- A warning message is also displayed in the PCA Web Console when SELinux is enabled.
Disable iptables
On the Linux server hosting the CX Passive Capture Application, disable the use of iptables
to disable the Linux firewall .
Note: If iptables
are enabled and cannot be disabled, you can disable the firewall through Linux to access the PCA Web Console. For more information, review the documentation that came with your Linux release.
To disable iptables
, run the following commands in the listed order and then restart the PCA.
service iptables save
service iptables stop
chkconfig iptables off
Note: For more information about iptables
, review the documentation that came with your Linux release.
Hyperthreading
Note: If the CX PCA is hosted on a server that supports hyperthreading, do not disable it. It is enabled on most servers that support it and must be enabled for the Acoustic Tealeaf CX Passive Capture Application.
If you are using multiple instances of the CX PCA, do not count the hyperthreaded virtual processors as available CPU cores. To calculate the maximum number of CX PCA instances, count only the real CPU cores.
32-bit Multi-Core O/S
For a multi-core system with a 32-bit operating system, the installation process automatically detects the additional processors and installs an SMP kernel to enable multi-core support. Physical Address Extension (PAE) support is included as part of the SMP kernel and supports up to 16 GB of RAM on a 32-bit operating system.
64-bit Multi-Core O/S
In a multi-core system with a 64-bit operating system, the installation process requires no additional kernels.
Note: The 32-bit versions of the required libraries must be installed from the installation disk of your 64-bit version of Linux.