[Update 11/2020] Omada SDN Controller 4.2.4 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems

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[Update 11/2020] Omada SDN Controller 4.2.4 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems

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139 Reply
Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-07-27 10:08:49

Hi Roby, cool, thanks for the info!

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#32
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-07-27 10:16:11

@Roby

that is interesting... Super long as u said the setup.. But most interesting, thks for posting the link! 😍

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#33
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-04 07:29:26

I have been running the Docker version for about a week. Happy to report I have not yet run into any issues. Thanks @Ronald1965!

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#34
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-06 17:22:11

@R1D2 I have been struggling to install java 8 on a debian 9 system.  It seems that every link I find in google is using some deprecated repository, or it can't find java 8 and why don't you go ahead and use 11?

 

Can someone, for the love of linux, please just tell me the commands I need to use to install java 8 on a debian system?  Or at least what is the package name that apt install won't choke on?  Or a good repository?

 

I have tried installing this controller on Centos, Ubuntu and now Debian, and every single one of them has some problem like it can't find java_home, or it's using java 11, or something.

 

It would be nice to have a step by step (and I mean every step, not just "Oh, install java") to get this thing running on Linux.  I have it running on Windows with absolutely no problems.  I'd love to use linux, but everything is just a sea of google searches every time I try to do something.  Sorry for the rant.

 

Thanks,

 

chili

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#35
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-06 19:10:36 - last edited 2020-08-06 19:14:47

 

chili-bean wrote

or it can't find java 8 and why don't you go ahead and use 11?

 

Because Omada SDN Controller requires JRE8. Complain to TP-Link, please.

 

I have tried installing this controller on Centos, Ubuntu and now Debian, and every single one of them has some problem like it can't find java_home, or it's using java 11, or something.

 

 

I don't know CentOS or Ubuntu, but at least the latter is Debian-based and Debian in their endless wisdom decided to not support Oracle JRE8 in their repos. They prefer OpenJDK. Complaints need to go to the Debian maintainers.

 

Now, Debian is a Linux, but Linux is not Debian. If those guys dictate what users can install and what not, it's not the fault of Linux.

 

And please don't argue with me about Windows, you will lose against someone like me who never ever had to use crappy DOS/Windows in meanwhile 40 years IT business. In the late 1980ies Microsoft even did distribute the (much better) Xenix system, what back then was what Linux is today: the most often used UNIX system. MS did not develop Xenix (thank's God), they just were a distributor among others.

 

Yeah, and they had DOS. With flat files filesystem, no directories. They developed DOS further on their Xenix-based development machines to have something to make money out of crap. You could have bought Xenix from them, but then they could not force you to buy more software only available from MS.

 

They soon noticed that they need directories in DOS b/c the filesystem got kind of messy over the time and so MS did stole the idea of directories (among other ideas) from Xenix, but changed the '/' (slash character) to '\' (backslash character) in pathnames just to annoy people and make them dependent on Microsoft's DOS. Those guys at MS are pretty good sales people, but no real developers at all.

 

Where we are today? Since WinNT MS uses UNIX under the hood for the OS (requirement of governmental customers in the U.S.: Windows must be POSIX-compatible, i.e. understand UNIX/Linux system calls, else governmental institutions would not buy it anymore).

 

So what you have today after 40 years permanent annoyance with Microsoft software is a still crappy Windows graphical UI software on top of a stable, reliable UNIX-like (and POSIX-compliant) »real« operating system kernel. 40 years money-spending to MS to just come from Xenix to UNIX with the whole pathology of MS. For me it was way cheaper, no single cent spent to MS!

 

Can someone, for the love of linux, please just tell me the commands I need to use to install java 8 on a debian system?

 

  1. Go straight to the Oracle website. They even provide a nice web address for it: https://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp
  2. Select and download the JRE for Linux x64. Ignore the weird suffix (.gz), it's a gzip'ed TAR archive (.tgz). Oracle people are Windows guys (sic!).
  3. As root, create a directory of your choice, I recommend: /opt/jvm
  4. Change into the new directory and, still as root, extract the TAR archive: tar xvzf jre-8u261-linux-x64.gz (replace with the actual name of the filr you did save the download in).
  5. Now install JRE in a way compatible with a parallel installation of OpenJDK or whatever you have from a Debian repository. This will avoid replacement of the java symlink when installing another JRE from a repository:

 

# update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jvm/jre1.8.0_261/bin/java 261
update-alternatives: using /opt/jvm/jre1.8.0_261/bin/java to provide /usr/bin/java (java) in auto mode

# ^D

 

Finally check which version will be executed when you run the »java« executable. See also the manpage of update-alternatives to learn about this concept:


$ which java
/usr/bin/java
$ ls -l /usr/bin/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 22 Aug 23  2018 /usr/bin/java -> /etc/alternatives/java
$ ls -l /etc/alternatives/java
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 30 Aug  6 20:41 /etc/alternatives/java -> /opt/jvm/jre1.8.0_261/bin/java
$ java - version

java version "1.8.0_261"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_261-b12)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.261-b12, mixed mode)

 

Done. Pretty easy if you go to the primary source for Oracle's JRE8.

 

 

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#36
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-07 00:04:00 - last edited 2020-08-07 00:06:57

@chili-bean 

 

I wish I had saved the detailed steps from my Ubuntu 18.04 install but I had to enter the path to openjdk-8-jre in several config files to get it to work

 

I see that @R1D2 posted instructions for Oracle Java while I was composing this and got distracted!

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#37
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-07 01:32:38

@R1D2 Thank you.  I did have to use "update-alternatives --config java" to switch from version 11, which was apparently installed on my system.

 

Also, I didn't mean to say windows was all that great, what I meant was that I double-click on a .exe file and it installs everything I need first time.  No cruising google or forums to get it to work.  As you can see, I would prefer to use linux as it's much nicer for controllers etc (no constant reboots for updates, or bloated disk usage/memory usage), but it's just so darn hard sometimes.

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#38
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-07 06:40:30 - last edited 2020-08-07 06:52:22

 

chili-bean wrote

what I meant was that I double-click on a .exe file and it installs everything I need first time.  No cruising google or forums to get it to work.

 

Yes, it installs everything needed with each new application. The surprise begins when trying to run two applications at the same time which installed their own copies of mongodb or different drivers for the same hardware adapter. Suddenly »something doesn't work since last week anymore«.

 

For example, see this thread where a customer bought a Pharos CPE and replaced it three times by a new device b/c his Windows PC refuses to connect to the web UI. I guess his system got so screwed up over the time, that even a web browser doesn't work anymore as expected. Typical recommendation at the end: remove the OS, re-install from the beginning. And remember two reboot seven dozen times during installation.

 

Did you know that MS did hide a big movie in their Office product, which shows you their office rooms in Redmond if you manage to find the secret keycode to start playing this movie? They waste your disk space with such a crap, don't even tell you about it and at the end one wonders why the new Windows version needs much more disk space and more RAM, forcing you to buy a new PC. Big business for MS, waste of time for the customer.

 

I worked with colleagues who had to support Windows (I gave Linux trainings, this was their main business). About 70% of their time those colleagues had been hunting for bugs, misconfigurations, broken registries, missing drivers etc. etc. Only 30% of their time was spent for productive work.

 

Now we will see what happens if MS finishes »their own Linux« currently being »developed« there (that means being »infiltrated with standards-breaking code«). You can bet that it won't interoperate easily with other open systems. MS has a long history of bringing FUD to the IT, breaking common open standards and always make their own thing. The notation of »their own Linux« alone discloses their agenda.

 

Back to Omada Controller: Until v4.1.5 Omada Controller for Linux came bundled with (some) prerequisites such as JRE and a pretty out-of-date version of mongodb, too. It was directly ported 1:1 from Windows. Since this did interfere with system-provided mongodb on Linux I urged R&D to use the system-provided packages instead. But the issue is still not resolved fully b/c Omada Controller starts its own instance of mongodb instead of just connecting to an already runing one provided by the system. This still needs to be changed IMO.

 

Anyway, on distributions like Raspbian (a Debian fork) or Devuan (another Debian fork) installation of Omada Controller is just a matter of installing the .deb package and it runs out of the box.

 

Recently Debian lost many developers and maintainers from their core team when introducing systemd in Debian, which is a good example for doing software the wrong way by following the Windows philosophy. Everything you can think of is going to be integrated in systemd.

 

The list of bugs and exploits in systemd grows every day and sysadmins learn to waste an increasing amount of their time just for hunting bugs in systemd. The core members from Debian who left the project are now working on the systemd-free Devuan project. Take a look at this distribtuion (https://devuan.org/) if you want a stable system suitable for use on servers.

 

But don't worry with the big Linux learning curve. Every day you learn more and after some time you can always find a solution very quickly to solve any task using Linux. At least you should now be able to run Omada Controller on your Debian system, provided you have the latest stable distribution which supports a modern mongodb.

 

 

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#39
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-07 07:03:27

Hi @unmesh,

 

if OpenJDK uses the update-alternatives mechanism (resp. update-java-alternatives on some systems), the java binary should set all required evironment variables automatically (at least it does so with Oracle JRE8). Just make sure the correct alternative has been selected.

 

Maybe, in OpenJDK you have to set JAVA_HOME expliciltly. Just assign it the top-level directory of your Java JRE or JDK. You can find out this location by using dpkg with the list options (-l and -L). Then set JAVA_HOME in the CONFIG file present in Omada Controller's top-level directory /opt/tplink/OmadaController for versions 3.2.10 and 4.1.5 (file /etc/default/omadad in previous versions).

 

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#40
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Re:Omada SDN Controller 4.1.5 for Devuan, Debian and other Linux systems
2020-08-07 15:39:29
Yes, I did finally get it working on a Debian 9 system. It's actually a LXC running inside a Proxmox system, which is purpose-built to only run the Omada controller. And to your point it's much more responsive and uses less resources than the Windows system I originally installed it on (because I couldn't get it working on Linux). Thanks for your help.
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#41
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