[smokeping-users] debug of smokeping... and a suggestion.

[Steve Murphy]

Hello all--

I've just spent two days playing with smokeping, getting myself
acquainted. And I thought I'd be helpful to those who come after me,
and share a few problems and solutions.

a. I spent over 4 hours trying to get the website to work. In the end,
   I got a bunch of "500" result codes from the fcgid stuff in httpd,
   and a bunch of broken links. So, I basically erased it all,
   and started almost from scratch, and followed the instructions
   very carefully at:

http://www.wedebugyou.com/2012/11/how-to-install-and-configure-smokeping-on-centos-6/
   I also read some emails from here warning that following such
"unauthorized"
   cookbooks can lead to disaster, but happily, for my situation, with
centos6, it
   worked great. I was mostly up and running in less than an hour.

b. If you get this in your http error_log:

[Fri Jan 30 15:55:09 2015] [warn] [client 67.67.67.67] mod_fcgid: stderr:
[Fri Jan 30 15:55:09 2015] smokeping_cgi [client 67.67.67.67]: Can't call
method "_pings
" on an undefined value at /opt/smokeping/bin/../lib/Smokeping.pm line
888., referer:
http://smokeping.voclarion.com/smokeping/smokeping.cgi?target=Host3
[Fri Jan 30 15:55:15 2015] [warn] mod_fcgid: cleanup zombie process 19016

    ... You might seriously consider that you are making a reference to a
target
    in a Multi-host graph.  Make sure you spell your host names right!

 c. If you see this:

[Fri Jan 30 10:27:25 2015] [error] [client 67.67.67.67] Premature end of
script headers: cropper.js, referer:
http://199.199.199.199/smokeping/cgi-bin/smokeping.fcgi?
target=Test.Host1
[Fri Jan 30 10:27:26 2015] [warn] [client 67.67.67.67] (104)Connection
reset by peer: mod_fcgid: error reading data from FastCGI server, referer:
http://199.199.199.199
/smokeping/cgi-bin/smokeping.fcgi?target=Test.Host1

     ... Again, make sure you all your refs will match a def!

And, so, having spent sooo much time on such trivial issues, I have two
suggestions, whose
implementation, I believe, might spare more than a few users some large
amounts of
wasted time:

1. Please, add some code to do a quick check of every ref, to make sure the
    it matches a def, and if not, returns the line number, and the ref
string itself.
    I ran with the --check option, and nothing popped up.

2. Some scripts for each major OS, to install the web interface, would be
    very helpful. I fully notice and appreciate the fact that the web code
and
    daemon code are irrevocably intermingled.... but I also see that they
are
    so tied together, that it is a mistake to separate the two and let the
users
    fend for themselves when it comes to installing the goodies in apache.
    The "optimal" (or something as close as practical) way
    to do the integration between the two needs some attention.

I'd help with either, but... no spare time right now. Others are closer to
the code
and able to implement these kinds of things faster/better than I, lowly
newbie that I am.

murf
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