=head1 NAME smokeping_install - How to install SmokePing =head1 OVERVIEW This document explains how to setup SmokePing at your site. =head1 DESCRIPTION =head2 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. =over =item RRDtool 1.2.x L Just follow the installation instructions. We need this package todo all the logging and graphing in SmokePing. =item FPing The official site L seems to be a bit unmaintained. You might want to grab an updated version of fping from L. 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. =item EchoPing (Optional) L You need this to run the EchoPing probes =item Curl (Optional) L You need this for the Curl probe. =item dig (Optional) L You need this for the DNS probe. =item SSH (Optional) L You need this for the SSH probe. =item Various Perl modules (Most of these are optional) You can get these from L. =over =item 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. =item 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. =item Net::Telnet You need this for the TelnetIOSPing probe. =item Net::DNS You need this for the AnotherDNS probe. =item Net::LDAP You need this for the LDAP probe. =item IO::Socket::SSL You need this if you want the LDAP probe to be able to use the 'starttls' command. =item Authen::Radius You need this for the Radius probe. =back =item Webserver L 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 F system for running CGI scripts. Often it is sufficient to change the F binary to setuid root and restart Apache. Using F allow to run cgi scripts under proper user accounts. =item Perl 5.8.8 L I guess you will get away with older versions of perl. I am using 5.8.8 here and it works fine. =item SpeedyCGI L 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. =item CGI::Carp L 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 C variable in the C section to the value C. =back =head2 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 B 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 F<*.dist> they have to be edited and renamed to F<*>. Below you find a short explanation for each of the files you have to edit: =over =item F Make sure all the required libraries are available and the first line of the script points to your copy of perl. Adjust the B lines to point to your B installation and to the B directory and edit the path of the config file to be in sync with reality. =item F Edit the F analog to the F 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 B line similar to what you did to F. =item F 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 F (see below). =item F Create your SmokePing configuration file. The easiest is to copy the F file and work from there. Please refer to L for details. =item F 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. =item F If you are going to use the B IP support, customize the contents of this file. =back =head2 Starting the Smokeping Daemon With all the scaffolding in place, you can now launch the smokeping daemon and send have it gather data for you. First you may want to run it in debug mode to see what it is doing ./bin/smokeping --debug once all is well, start it up as a deamon. I would recomend to enable the logfile option so that you can see if it runs into trouble. ./bin/smokeping --logfile=smoke.log Once the system works, you may want to put a SmokePing startup script into your F tree. Check out L for further information. When you can now also open the smokeping.cgi webpage to look at your data. =head2 Adding SmokeTrace online Traceroute ability If you want to add traceroute ability to your smokeping setup, check out the L manual page. =head1 COPYRIGHT Copyright (c) 2001, 2008 by Tobias Oetiker. All right reserved. =head1 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. =head1 AUTHOR Tobias Oetiker Etobi@oetiker.chE =cut