[smokeping-users] Installing and getting Smokeping to run on Fedora 10

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Thu, 29 Jan 2009, Guy Lajeunesse wrote:

> I'm 'kinda' a noob to this Linux world...

Welcome.

> I'm a Windows guy

Not any more. :)

> I decided to setup a Fedora 10 box.

Wouldn't have been my first choice, but it's a good choice.

> I'm having problems with this Smokeping program!

It's more than a program.  It's a system.  There's a lot in it.
You've picked a difficult installation for a beginner if things
go wrong, because there's a lot involved in a working Smokeping
system, but it's quite doable.  Basically you have five things
that all need to be working (I've used spaced to format these
next few lines so please use a fixed pitch character set to view:)

1. Perl        An enormous can of worms but Fedora has it taped.
2. RRDtool     A package for handling time-series data.
3. Smokeping   Collects the data, stores it using RRD, serves it
               to clients using Apache
4. Apache      One of the most popular Webservers in the world, might
               even be the most popular.
5. A browser   Any browser, such as Firefox, Konqueror, Opera or
               even Internet Exploder.

The browser doesn't have to be on the same machine, but it can be.
Smokeping can be on several machines and feed all the data to one
RRDtool installation.

>  I followed the instructions found at:
> http://lzheng.blogspot.com/2007/02/install-smokeping-via-yum.html

Again, wouldn't have been my first choice.  Try to learn how to
install packages from the source, by reading the documentation
which comes with the original package.  Then learn how to create
a package for yourself.  I promise it will be worth the effort.

> which were great, except that Smokeping isn't working!

That's normal.

> ... but when I got to:
>
> cd /usr/local/smokeping/bin
> for foo in *.dist; do cp $foo `basename $foo .dist`; done
> ...
> this didn't work as I thought... what is this command doing?

It's just creating a copy of any file with the suffix .dist, but the
copy doesn't have the suffix.  The copy is in the same directory.
It's a kind of precaution, so that you can mess around with the copy
but still have the original in there for reference.  Sometimes this
kind of thing is also a precaution to prevent over-writing files in
places like the configuration directories just in case e.g. you're
upgrading an installation as opposed to installing from scratch, and
you don't want to overwrite any existing files.  Read

man basename
man cp
man bash

That last one will take you a while.  You might be better off reading
the O'Reilly book.  You need to get a copy of it anyway, now you're a
Linux guy.  You'll also need to read about Apache and it will help an
awful lot if you learn a bit about Perl, C, and make.

> I think it's removing the .dist from the filenames in the folders?

No, it doesn't remove anything.

> Anyways, since it didn't work, I removed the .dist from every file
> in the folders shown above.

It's far better to find out why things didn't work, and fix the cause,
than it is to hack around making bodge fixes.  The installation
scripts were created with great care, and you can break all sorts of
things if you mess around without understanding what you're doing.
One of the problems with yum-like installations is that they cannot
possibly take account of all the different things that people do to
their systems.  Some of the things they do are, well, a little odd,
especially when they don't know what they're doing. :)

> Next problem was with:
>
> use lib
> qw(/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.5/i386-linux-thread-multi/auto/RRDs);
>
> my perl version is 5.10.0, so I made that change (5.8.5)
>
> I don't have a RRDs folder in this location.

Then find out where it is and use that path.  And please stop talking
about folders, you're not a Windows guy any more.  There are files,
and there are directories.  The term 'folder' can mean either, but is
generally reserved for use by mail clients which can treat both files
and directories as mail folders.  There are also links but we'll talk
about that later.

> I've been doing some reading and I should have some files in this
> folder.  I don't even have the folder... and when I search for RRD*,
> I don't get anything!

man find
man locate
man slocate

> next, when I run: /usr/local/smokeping/bin/smokeping &    I get:
>
> Can't locate loadable object for module RRDs in @INC

That's to be expected if you haven't got the right 'use lib' line(s).
Don't worry about it.

> Can someone HELP ME!!!  PLEASE!!!

You don't need to shout, nor even to ask.  We're here to help, and you
probably wouldn't be posting if you didn't need help. :)

> I will be forever greatful!!! :)

I believe you. :)

> there a yum package that I need?  I perfer yum packages 'cuz it
> takes care of dependencies for me.

No, they sometimes take care of dependencies for you, which is why I
hate those things so much.  Granted, Red Hat, oops, sorry, Fedora are
better than most, but in my experience there's no substitute for
knowing what's going on.

Can we take it that you've been using the privileged 'root' account
where it's been necessary (and where it isn't, not using it)?

Do you have RRDtool installed properly?  The first thing to check
is that you can use RRDtool itself.  What happens if you type

man rrdtool

or

rrdtool help create

?

--

73,
Ged.