[smokeping-users] new user needing help!

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Thu, 14 Aug 2008, Cablenetguy wrote:

> I am new to smokeping and have no idea where to get started, really,
> but am a quick study if I have a man page that can be read or some
> helpful URL's I could peruse.

Have you tried Google?  Type smokeping in the box, see the first hit.

> A friend of mine runs Open BSD and uses smokeping with that distro
> which is very vanilla, would that be better since I don't really
> need this box to do anything else?

It really doesn't matter what distro you use, but to me it seems like
a waste of energy to run an entire machine just to run Smokeping.  Why
not put it on some other machine?

> I am running it on older hardware (PII450 384 MB RAM, 120 GB HDD, 32
> MB VRAM card) so I don't want to push the hardware too far beyond
> its' capabilities as it will be monitoring hosts on a 24-7 basis.

You can't push the box beyond its capabilities.  It won't go there.
It won't be pushing that box to do what you need to do, but I must
repeat you don't need an entire server just to send a few packets
to a few hosts, store a few MB of data and draw some pretty graphs.

FWIW, for ordinary pings with the default settings I see disc usage of
about 3 megabytes per .rrd file (one file per source and target), and
about a third of that for SSH and HTTP pings.  The master uses half a
second of CPU per day per target, but I haven't tried very hard at all
to set it up for effifcient usage of the host, it's a powerful machine
and most of the time it isn't heavily loaded.  A Smokeping slave on a
connected network is using about one second of CPU per day to monitor
a dozen hosts.

The webserver will probably consume more resources than the pinging,
but you'll soon tire of looking at the graphs.  Don't leave browsers
on the smokeping pages if you don't want to waste computing resources
as the pages are updated automatically.

--

73,
Ged.