Sentinel Express is installed through the use of an installer program.

The installer can run in interactive and non-interactive modes - suitable for manual and automated installs respectively. When running in interactive mode it will prompt you for various necessary settings and save them.

Tip The installer will offer to install the Rhino SDK for you, or allow you to specify an existing Rhino installation. Once either a new Rhino SDK install, or an existing installation is selected the installer will install Sentinel Express into your Rhino or Rhino SDK.

The installer prepares configures for a single node Sentinel Express system.

For more advanced configurations, such as clustering, or multiple signalling peers, it is recommended the you become familiar with the Rhino platform, SIS and Sentinel Express products.

To install Sentinel Express services in interactive mode:

For further information on installation read:

1. Unzip sentinel-express-sdk.zip

To unzip sentinel-express-sdk.zip:

1

Copy the downloaded SDK zip file to a machine where Rhino and Sentinel Express will run.

Tip It’s easiest if you create a new directory in the home directory.
user@machine$ mkdir ~/sentinel-express

2

Unzip.

user@machine$ cp ~/sentinel-express-sdk.zip ~/sentinel-express
user@machine$ cd ~/sentinel-express
user@machine$ unzip sentinel-express-sdk.zip

2. Run the installer

The install program is split into several "phases".

These are:

  • initialisation of the environment

  • question and answer (in interactive mode)

  • execution of installation

Tip the installer captures full logging from the various tools that it uses, and writes these logs into the sentinel-express-sdk/build/target/log directory.

To run the installer:

1

The installer command is in the build/bin directory of the extracted Sentinel Express SDK .

testuser@machine$ cd ~/sentinel-express/sentinel-express-sdk
testuser@machine$ ./build/bin/installer

The installer first initialises the environment. It typically shows output similar to the following

Initialising the SDK ...
Retrieving Installer dependencies ... done.

2

Question and answer to determine necessary settings

The installer will prompt the user for various values. A value inside square brackets, if present, is the default answer for that question. When the user presses the Enter key without entering any value the default is used if it is present. If the default isn’t present, the prompt will be repeated. In subsequent runs of the installer, the default will reflect the values that the user has previously entered.

Explanations of all of the questions the installer will ask are laid out over the next few steps. Note that some of the questions will only appear under certain circumstances, so not all of them will be seen in a given installer run.

3

Basic SDK Questions

Your organization's name, e.g. Rocket Communications Inc.
sdk.component.vendor [UNSET] >

This value will be used for the vendor portion of the SLEE Component ID for all SLEE components published by the SDK.

sdk.component.version [1.0] >

This value will be used for the version portion of the SLEE Component ID for all SLEE components published by the SDK.

The name of the platform operator, e.g. Rocket.
sdk.platform.operator.name [UNSET] >

The name of the platform operator for the system. It is used extensively throughout configuration profiles.

An Ivy organization field, recommended lower case with no whitespace e.g. "rocket".
sdk.ivy.org [UNSET] >

This value is used as the org value for all Ivy artifacts created by the SDK.

sdk.ivy.publish.revision [1.0.0] >

This value is used as the base of the revision value for all Ivy artifacts created by the SDK. When an artifact is actually published, additional letters and numbers will be appended to this number to identify specific releases, snapshots and milestones.

5

Install Rhino Questions

You can either have the installer set up a Rhino SDK for you or point it at an existing Rhino installation, SDK or production.
Note: If you want to use an existing Rhino installation it has to be running and a proper license has to be installed when finishing the installation after the configuration. Also make sure that you have adjusted the memory settings and created a tcapsim-gt-table.txt file as detailed in the documentation.
Set up a Rhino SDK installation automatically? y/[N] >

If you allow the installer to set up a new Rhino SDK installation, it will prompt for a license file.

Enter the path to your Rhino license file > /home/testuser/Downloads/opencloud.license

It then installs the Rhino SDK and starts it.

If you instruct the installer to use an existing Rhino, the installer will prompt for the path to the Rhino client directory.

Enter the path to your Rhino client directory > /home/testuser/rhino/{prd-majorversion-rhino}/client

If the associated installation is a Rhino production then additional information is required to complete configuration.

You can either have the installer deploy against Rhino SDK or production.
Does the specified client point to a production installation? y/[N] >

If you choose Yes, then the installer prompts for details of the cluster nodes and hosts.

Enter your Rhino node setup.
It has to be formatted like this: {nodeId,nodeId}host,{nodeId}host
Examples:
  {101}localhost
  {101,102}host1,{103}host2
Node setup [{101}localhost] > {101}hostname1,{102}hostname2

6

Review settings

Once all questions have been answered, the user is provided the opportunity to review and if happy, accept the settings. TIP: settings are saved to disk, so that they can be read later.

Review settings
***************


Basic SDK properties
====================

  sdk.component.vendor: Rocket Communications Inc
  sdk.component.version: 1.0
  sdk.platform.operator.name: Rocket
  sdk.ivy.org: rocket
  sdk.ivy.publish.revision: 1.0.0

... edited for brevity

Accept these values? [Y]/n > y

Updating file {sdk-path}/sdk.properties

Configuration changes written.

If the user presses the n key then the questions are asked again. Note that the list of configuration files that have been modified are printed out by the configuration portion.

7

Which product(s) to deploy

The user can choose which Sentinel products to deploy as part of the installation, any combination of Sentinel SIP, Sentinel SS7 and Sentinel Diameter can be specified.

This installer can be used to create deployment modules for one or more of the following Sentinel products: "diameter", "sip" and "ss7". Please enter the products you would like to deploy as a comma-separated list.
Which products do you want to deploy? [sip,ss7,diameter] >

For each option the user specifies, a deployment module will be created to deploy the specified product.

8

Sentinel SS7 with SIS

If Sentinel SS7 was one of the products selected for deployment, the user will be presented with an option to install Sentinel SS7 with SIS.

Do you want to install sentinel-ss7 with SIS? y/[N] >

If the user enters y then Sentinel Express will install and configure SIS for use with the Sentinel SS7 service.

9

Creation of a deployment module

The installer will now create the required deployment module(s). This may take several minutes.

10

Execution phase

Now that the installer has gathered all necessary information it provides the user with the option to install Sentinel Express immediately.

Install now? [Y]/n >

If the user wants to install at a later time, they can press the n key. The installer exits having saved settings that the user has entered. I.e. the installer can be run later if desired.

Installing Rhino ... done.
Starting Rhino in the background ... done.
Publishing deployment module deploy-sentinel-diameter ... done.
Publishing deployment module deploy-sentinel-sip ... done.
Publishing deployment module deploy-sentinel-ss7 ... done.

Creating deployment module deploy-sentinel ... done.
Publishing deployment module deploy-sentinel ... done.
Deploying; this is going to take a while ... done.
Binding; this is going to take a while ... done.
Configuring; this is going to take a while ... done.

Installation completed successfully in 8 minutes and 38 seconds. Rhino has been left running to finish applying configuration changes.

The installation has now completed successfully.

Important A properties file is automatically created when the interactive installer is run. This file is located in the sentinel-express-sdk directory and named install.properties. In this way an interactive installations settings are saved, and can be distributed through the install.properties file. You can later use this file for a new installation using the Non-interactive mode.

Non-interactive mode

To run the installer in non-interactive mode a properties file must be passed to the installer program.

testuser@machine$ cd ~/sentinel-express/sentinel-express-sdk
testuser@machine$ ./build/bin/installer -p my-install.properties

SIS and CGIN

During installation SIS and CGIN versions are extracted into the SDK directory structure. This is so that SIS can be configured as necessary.

The CGIN connectivity pack is extracted into the sentinel-express-sdk/cgin/cgin-connectivity-full-CGIN_VERSION directory. The SIS is extracted into the sentinel-express-sdk/sis/SIS_VERSION directory. Here CGIN_VERSION and SIS_VERSION are the release versions for each product respectively (e.g. 3.1.0 and 3.2.0)

The SIS console command is located at sentinel-express-sdk/sis/SIS_VERSION/admin/sis-console.

Background information

The installer sits on top of the Sentinel Express SDK infrastructure

The installer works by creating "deployment modules" for the products within Sentinel Express. These modules are named "deploy-sentinel", "deploy-sentinel-sip", "deploy-sentinel-ss7" and "deploy-sentinel-diameter". They are located in the root of the Sentinel Express SDK directory.

A deployment module can be created through the use of the sdkadm create-deployment-module command.

The deployment modules are then published, and the deployer, binder and configurer are invoked in order to install/bind/configure the application in Rhino.

This means that the the installer is part of the Sentinel Express SDK, and that there is no technology difference between the SDK and an "off the shelf install". Therefore custom configurations can easily be made through modifying the deployment modules, publishing them, and running the configurer.

Installer log files

The installer captures full logging from the various tools that it uses, and writes these logs into the sentinel-express-sdk/build/target/log directory. This output is more verbose than the user sees when running the installer.

Each time an install is done, a file called installer.log is created in this directory. If there is a previous installer.log file, it is moved to installer_[date].log. The value of [date] is the time of the last write timestamp in the file.

Therefore running the installer three times results in three installer log files.

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Sentinel Express Version 4.1