SMOKEPING_INSTALL(7) SmokePing SMOKEPING_INSTALL(7)
NAME
smokeping_install - How to install SmokePing
OVERVIEW
This document explains how to setup SmokePing at your site.
DESCRIPTION
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:
Ubuntu:
sudo apt install rrdtool librrds-perl libssl-dev
RedHat:
sudo yum install rrdtool perl-rrdtool openssl-devel
FPing (optional)
Go to 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)
You need this to run the EchoPing probes
Curl (Optional)
You need this for the Curl probe.
dig (Optional)
You need this for the DNS probe.
SSH (Optional)
You need this for the SSH probe.
Webserver
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 and
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.
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 2001, 2011 by Tobias Oetiker. All right reserved.
LICENSE
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your
option) any later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along
with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc.,
675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
AUTHOR
Tobias Oetiker
2.8.2 2024-07-13 SMOKEPING_INSTALL(7)