=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
L
The official site seems to be a bit unmaintained. You might want to grab the
fping source from L (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.
=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