Big Brother - Installation

Windows Management server

A Windows Big Brother Professional Edition v4.20 management server is supported on XP, 2000 Server or Pro, 2003 Server, or, Windows 2008. IIS must be installed on the management server as well. Previous versions of BBPE are supported on all of the above except Windows 2008.

Some basic system requirements for a Windows BBServer are:

  • Pentium II 400Mhz or later, or equivalent, server
  • 4GB of disk space for historical data (more if you plan to use a database and/or save performance/trending data)
  • Windows XP, 2000 Server or Professional, 2003 Server or Windows 2008
  • TCP/IP networking

    • The first thing you need to confirm (after meeting the basic requirements) is whether or not IIS is installed. If not, you must install IIS

    Installing Big Brother Professional Edition

    1. Go to the directory where you downloaded the installation file.
    2. Double-click the bbntdpe-420.exe installer (the name may be different if you're installing other than 4.20) , then click Next to begin the install.



    3. Accept the Big Brother license agreement and click Next.



    4. Enter your name and organization then click Next.



    5. Click Next to accept the default installation direcotry, or, enter a different directory to install the BB server software and click Next.



    6. Click Next to accept the default database direcotry (BBVAR), or, enter a different directory for historical data and click Next.



    7. Review the information and click Install.



    8. When the install wizard has enough information to continue, you'll see the image below. Click Finish to start the installation.



    9. When the install wizard completes you'll see the image below. Click yes to start the BBServer Windows service.



    After the Wizard attempts to start the BBServer service the quickstart.txt file pop's up and behind that you'll see instructions on how to get a permanent license for your new management server.



    Hit enter to continue...

    At this point your Windows BBPE server should be running and you can check the Windows Services to confirm. The service name will look something like:

    Big Brother Professional Edition Server 4.20.

    If the BBPE server service is running; congratulations, you're now a Brother.

    You can view the Big Brother main display by launching your favorite browser and navigate to:

    http://bbserver/bb (replace bbserver with the hostname of the BBServer machine)

    And you should see something like:



    After five minutes, or so, the main display will refresh and you should see your BBServer hostname with a couple columns and status icons.



    Now, you need to install a BBPE client on the BBServer machine to monitor local system information like cpu, disk space, processes, services and more...