smokeping_install - How to install SmokePing
This document explains how to setup SmokePing at your site.
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.
Just follow the installation instructions. We need this package todo all the logging and graphing in SmokePing.
This is a special version of fping which actually builds. I have not modified the code in any way, I just fixed the autoconf setup. The original can be found on http://www.fping.com/download/fping-2.4b2.tar.gz
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.
You need this if you want to use the FPing6 probe
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.
You need this to run the EchoPing probes
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.
I guess you will get away with older versions of perl. I am using 5.6.1 here and it works fine.
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.
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:
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 (c) 2001 by Tobias Oetiker. All right reserved.
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.
Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>