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

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

Please keep traffic on the list.

On Fri, 30 Jan 2009, Guy Lajeunesse wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 30, 2009 at 3:56 AM, G.W. Haywood <ged at jubileegroup.co.uk>wrote:
>
> > 1. Perl        An enormous can of worms but Fedora has it taped.
>
> I know Perl is working, I made a little "hello world" perl script and it
> worked

Well that's a good start, but there's a bit more to it than ust having
a working interpreter (like being able to find all the modules;).

> RDDtool ... homework for me

:)

> Smokeping - once I get RDDtool working, I'll work on getting it going.

A couple of things to watch out for when you start on this.  (1) People
seem to have quite a bit of trouble with permissions, so make sure that
the things you're trying to run are being run by the right user, and/or
have suitable filesystem permissions.  Don't go overboard giving 'rwx'
permissions to the world except for testing.  (2) Smokeping relies on a
lot of third-party tools, and some of them have changed during the life
of the Smokeping project.  Sometimes the Smokeping scripts will give a
switch or argument to a third-party tool and the tool fails to parse it
correctly because it is designed for an earlier or later version of the
tool.  In that case you either need to use the version of the tool that
Smokeping expects or modify Smokeping to suit the tool.  Of course it's
quite possible to have both versions of any particular tool installed,
you won't want to mess up your system for other uses/users.

> Apache - I know it's working because I have a webpage being served

The main things there are to get the Smokeping cgi-bin script in the
right place with the right permissions - and of course to give the
proper URL to the browser - and to make sure that the Web server can
write the data.  There have been a few threads on this on the mailing
list.  It's not a high-volume list so you'll should easily be able to
find the right messages in the list archives.

> Using Firefox, working great

I use Firefox most of the time too, seems to work fine with Smokeping.
I've seen a few little oddities with some other browsers like KDE, but
it still mostly works.

> Kinda figured it was copying (cp command) just didn't get the "foo"

Hehe.  It's a shell variable, as I guess you've figured out.  I like
to use, er, more descriptive variables, to make the code more obvious
to anyone who happens to be reading.  And put comments in there.

> Tried those commands... guess when I try to re-install everything
> the manual way, I hope to find the directory and files.  I used yum
> to install librrds-perl but I still can't find RRDs.pm anywhere...

root_prompt# find / -name RRDs.pm

> ... kinda figured the @INC was similar to the PATH variable

Quite so.  Try

perldoc perlfaq8

(and if you don't have perldoc installed - I'd be very surprised -
then you need to install it).

> Should these modules be installed in a directory within my perl
> directory?

Not necessarily, but it's normal.  However you may have several Perl
directoriesvalready.  When you're more familiar with the rationale
behind the directory hierarchy you'll start to decide where you want
things to be, rather than just accepting where someone else (e.g. the
package maintainer) decides they should be.  Most of the time the
maintainers' choice is fine, but there will obviously be occasions
when you know more about what you want to do, or about your system,
than they do.  For example you might not want other users on the
system to have access to certain facilities, so you might install
them just in your own home directory tree rather than system-wide.

> I tried a command I found on the 'net to test if my RRD
> : perl -MRRDs -le 'print q(ok!)'  and I get the same @INC error

That just means the path containing RRDs.pm hasn't been pushed into
@INC yet.  Sometimes paths aren't needed most of the time, so there's
little point in having them searched for stuff which won't be there -
it just wastes CPU cycles - and as I said you might not want things to
be available system-wide, So you can modify the Perl environment on
the occasions that you'll need those modules.

> > rrdtool help create
>
> Hmm.. I get the Usage information...

Then rrdtool should be installed Ok.

> do I have to create a new RRD???  looks interresting...  I will have
> to read up on this one..


Smokeping itself should create the databases for you.  Spending a bit
of quality time with the Smokeping documentation is a good idea, to my
mind it's a bit verbose, structured rather loosely and makes a few too
many assumptions, but Tobi's done a great job when you consider the
price you paid... :)

--

73,
Ged.