NAME

smokeping_install - How to install SmokePing


OVERVIEW

This document explains how to setup SmokePing at your site.


DESCRIPTION

Prerequisites

SmokePing does not stand alone. It relies on various other tools and services being present. Apart from a Unix OS and a working Perl installation you need the following things. The list contains the names of the tools together with the version of the tool which I am using, and a link for downloading the tool.

RRDtool 1.0.33
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.0.33.tar.gz

Just follow the installation instructions. We need this package todo all the logging and graphing in SmokePing.

FPing 2.4b2
http://www.fping.com/download/fping-2.4b2.tar.gz

This package did not compile on Solaris when I used the included configure script. But no sweat, it can be compiled on the commandline without much further ado.

 gcc fping.c -o fping -I. -DINADDR_NONE=0xffffffffU -lsocket -lnsl

fping must be installed setuid root. Make sure you are actually getting the version listed above ... older copies have the tendency to reporte tentimes as much latency as there is in reality

Webserver
http://httpd.apache.org/

Well I wont get much into this. The important thing is, to have a webserver which allows you to run CGI scripts. If you are using Apache I strongly recommend using the suexec system for running CGI scripts. Often it is sufficient to change the suexec binary to setuid root and restart Apache. Using suexec allow to run cgi scripts under propper user accounts.

Perl 5.6.1
http://www.perl.com

I guess you will get away with older versions of perl. I am using 5.6.1 here and it works fine.

SpeedyCGI
http://daemoninc.com/speedycgi/

SpeedyCGI speeds up CGIs written in perl dramatically by making them memory resident and handing new request to the script which is already running. SmokePing has been optimized for use with SpeedyCGI

Installation

Once the tools listed above are in place, you can start setting up SmokePing itself. Once the SmokePing tools are unpacked, they are more of less ready to use. At least to the extent, that it is not necessary to install them. You may want to rename the directory to a name which does not contain the version number of SmokePing, or at least make a symlink, so that you can use a persistant name when refering to SmokePing files.

The following files have to be edited:

bin/smokeping
Make sure all the required libraries are available and the first line of the script points to your copy of perl. Adjust the use/lib lines to point to your RRDtool installation and to the Smokeping/lib directory and edit the path of the config file to be in sync with reality.

htdocs/smokeping.cgi
Edit the smokeping.cgi analog to the smokeping script above. Make sure the first line of the script is pointing to your freshly installed copy of Speedy CGI. Store the script in a directory of your weberver where CGIs get executed.

etc/config
Create your SmokePing configuration file. The easiest is to copy the etc/config file and work from there. Please refere to the smokeping_config manpage for details.

etc/basepage.html
Edit the html template to your likings. Please do not remove the link to the SmokePing counter and my name from the template.

etc/smokemail
If you are going to use the DYNAMIC IP support, customize the contents of this file.

Now you are ready to start smokeping:

 ./bin/smokeping

Once the system works, you may want to put a smokeping startup script into your /etc/init.d tree. Check out the smokeping manpage for further information.

When you can now also open the smokeping.cgi webpage to look at your data.


COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2001 by Tobias Oetiker. All right reserved.


LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.


AUTHOR

Tobias Oetiker <tobi\@oetiker.ch>