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 components:

RRDtool 1.2.x or later

Smokeping uses RRDtool for logging and graphing. If your linux distro provides an rrdtool package with perl support, use this. If you want to get the latest and greatest version, compile your own: <http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/>

Ubuntu:

 sudo apt install rrdtool librrds-perl libssl-dev
    

RedHat:

 sudo yum install rrdtool perl-rrdtool openssl-devel
    

FPing (optional)

Go to <http://www.fping.org/> to grab a copy.

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 if it gets it wrong.

EchoPing (Optional)

<https://github.com/bortzmeyer/echoping/>

You need this to run the EchoPing probes

Curl (Optional)

<http://curl.haxx.se/>

You need this for the Curl probe.

dig (Optional)

<http://www.isc.org/sw/bind/>

You need this for the DNS probe.

SSH (Optional)

<http://www.openssh.org/>

You need this for the SSH probe.

Webserver

<http://httpd.apache.org/>

Well I won't get much into this. The important thing is, to have a webserver which allows you to run CGI and preferably FastCGI scripts. If you are using Apache I strongly recommend using the suexec system for running CGI scripts as a particular user.

See <http://httpd.apache.org/mod_fcgid/mod/mod_fcgid.html> and <http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/mod_suexec.html> for more information on this.

Perl 5.10.1 or later.

If you still have an older version, maybe have a look at perlbrew.

Ubuntu:

 sudo apt install perl
    

RedHat:

 sudo yum install perl-core
    

Installation¶

Once the tools listed above are in place, you can start setting up SmokePing itself. Unpack the tar archive and run the included configure script:

 ./configure --prefix=/opt/smokeping

Configure will verify that all the required perl modules are available. If some are missing it will tell you to run the module build script. Just follow the instructions on screen and then run configure again. Once it completes, you can run

 make install

to finish your setup.

Configuration¶

Use the etc/config.dist file as a template to create your own smokeping configuration file. See smokeping_config for details.

Installing the webinterface

Copy the content of the PREFIX/htdocs directory to the place where your webserver expects its data. Maybe to /var/www/smokeping.

Edit the smokeping.fcgi script to point to your smokeping_cgi script.

If you have no FastCGI support in your webserver, you may want to use the smokeping.cgi script.

etc/basepage.html

Edit the html template to your liking. Please do not remove the link to the SmokePing counter and my name from the template. The content of the template will be rendered by smokeping.cgi. This means that all embedded links must be relative to smokeping.cgi. If you are using HTTP authentication, then the template variable "authuser" will be populated from the $ENV{REMOTE_USER} environment variable.

etc/smokemail

If you are going to use the DYNAMIC IP support, customize the contents of this file.

Starting the Smokeping Daemon¶

With all the scaffolding in place, you can now launch the smokeping daemon and have it gather data for you. First you may want to run it in debug mode to see what it is doing

 ./bin/smokeping --config=/opt/smokeping/etc/config --debug

once all is well, start it up as a daemon. I would recommend you enable the logfile option so that you can see if it runs into trouble.

 ./bin/smokeping --config=/opt/smokeping/etc/config --logfile=smoke.log

Once the system works, you may want to put a SmokePing startup script into your /etc/init.d tree. Check out smokeping for further information.

You can now open the smokeping.cgi webpage to look at your data.

See the smokeping_cgi documentation on how to setup the smokeping web interface.