Install BigBrother on RedHat/CentOS

OK, the first thing you will say is “Why are you using BB?”  We like it.  Leave us alone. 🙂

The latest version we can find for Linux is 1.9i, which I believe to have been released in 2005 (you can still download it here).  But to get it working on the newer OS’s, there are some changes that need to be made.  Here are the steps I took to get BigBrother 1.9i working on CentOS 6 x64.  Most of the steps are in the instructions, but I included the whole process here.

  • Get the archive and extract it, then extract the Client archive it contains (to /usr/local/src)
  • Create the BigBrother user (‘bb’ – ‘adduser bb’)
  • Set ownership of the folder (‘chown -R bb:bb bbc1.9i-btf/’)
  • At this point I link the folder to /usr/local/bb. For some reason I find this easier, even though a new version will never be released…
  • Set this as bb’s Home Directory in /etc/passwd (‘/usr/local/bb’)
  • Change to the bb/install folder and run ‘./bbconfig’
  • Follow the prompts
  • As instructed, do a ‘cd /usr/local/bb/src; make; make install’
  • Edit the etc/bb-hosts file to indicate your Big Brother server and your local server
  • I don’t know if I found it somewhere or wrote it, but here is an init script for starting and stopping BB:  bb init script

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Now the differences:
To fix the log reading problem, go to /var/log and issue the command ‘chgrp bb messages; chmod g+r messages’
Now go to bb/bin/bb-disk.sh and find the following line:

eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT \”+${DFSORT}\” > $BBTMP/DFOUT.$$”

and comment/replace it with:

eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT –key=${DFSORT} – > $BBTMP/DFOUT.$$”

Then find the line:

wclen1=`eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT \”+${DFSORT}\” | $WC”`

and comment/replace it with:

wclen1=`eval “$DFCMD | $EGREP \”$DFUSE\” | $EGREP -v \”$DFEXCLUDE\” | $SORT –key=${DFSORT} – | $WC”`

This is necessary to fix the gnu/non-gnu sort command issue that crept up somewhere along the line…

Don’t forget to restart bb!

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