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 1.2.x
<http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>
Just follow the installation instructions. We need this package
todo all the logging and graphing in SmokePing.
FPing
<http://www.fping.com/>
The official site seems to be a bit unmaintained. You might want to
grab the fping source from
<http://packages.debian.org/unstable/net/fping> (at the bottom of
the page).
Note that fping must be installed setuid root. It seems that older
versions of fping report round trip times in 0.1 milliseconds
instead of 1 milliseconds as advertised ... SmokePing tries to
figure this out. It tells you when it starts ... let me know it it
gets it wrong.
EchoPing (Optional)
<http://echoping.sourceforge.net/>
You need this to run the EchoPing probes
Curl (Optional)
<http://curl.haxx.se/>
You need this for the Curl probe.
dig (Optional)
<http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/>
You need this for the DNS probe.
SSH (Optional)
<http://www.openssh.org/>
You need this for the SSH probe.
Various Perl modules (Most of these are optional)
You can get these from <http://www.cpan.org/>.
libwww-perl
The master/slave functionality introduced a dependency
LWP::UserAgent from the libwww-perl (also known as LWP)
library. Currently the module is needed even if the
master/slave mode is not enabled.
Socket6 0.11-1
Optionally installing the Socket6 module for perl enables
smokeping to check hostnames that only resolve to an IPv6
address. If you probe such hosts using ie. the FPing6 probe and
get warnings that those hosts don’t resolve to an IP address,
you need to install it.
Net::Telnet
You need this for the TelnetIOSPing probe.
Net::DNS
You need this for the AnotherDNS probe.
Net::LDAP
You need this for the LDAP probe.
IO::Socket::SSL
You need this if you want the LDAP probe to be able to use the
’starttls’ command.
Authen::Radius
You need this for the Radius probe.
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 proper user accounts.
Perl 5.8.8
<http://www.perl.com>
I guess you will get away with older versions of perl. I am using
5.8.8 here and it works fine.
SpeedyCGI
<http://www.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. Note that you do NOT need mod_speedy, just the plain and
simple speedy executable, this is the beauty of this tool it works
without touching your apache ... Otherwise you could as well be
using FastCGI or mod_perl. There is a bug in speedy with returning
error messages to the apache error log. You can find a patch in the
smokeping download area.
CGI::Carp
<http://http://search.cpan.org/~lds/CGI.pm/>
If you are using a version of Perl older than 5.8.1, you should
consider installing a newer version of CGI::Carp (must be at least
1.24, included in CGI.pm-2.82). Otherwise any error messages
generated by the CGI script will not show up quite as clean as they
could in the web server error log. If you can’t or don’t want to
upgrade CGI::Carp, you can also set the "changecgiprogramname"
variable in the "General" section to the value "no".
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 persistent name when referring to
SmokePing files.
In the distribution you find a number of files named *.dist they have
to be edited and renamed to *. Below you find a short explanation for
each of the files you have to edit:
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. You also have to edit the
use lib line similar to what you did to smokeping.
htdocs/cropper/*
To make the interactive graph-zoomer work, you have to place the
content of the cropper directory somewhere on your webserver and
adapt the links in basepage.html (see below).
etc/config
Create your SmokePing configuration file. The easiest is to copy
the etc/config file and work from there. Please refer to
smokeping_config 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. The
content of the template will be renderd by the smokeping.cgi. This
means that all embeded links must be relative to smokeping.cgi.
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 smokeping for further
information.
When you can now also open the smokeping.cgi webpage to look at your
data.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2001, 2005 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>