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.

RRDtool 1.0.x or 1.2.x

<http://people.ee.ethz.ch/oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/> Just follow the installation instructions. We need this package todo all the logging and graphing in SmokePing.

FPing

<http://www.fping.com/> You should grab the newest version, 2.4b2_to-ipv6, as it has IPv6 support and actually builds, unlike the older ones. 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 (Optional)

You can get these from <http://www.cpan.org/>.

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 5.6.1

<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://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 CWchangecgiprogramname variable in the CWGeneral section to the value CWno.

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

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.

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 (c) 2001, 2005 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>