These instructions will help you install and configure your own RRD::Simple Monitoring server, using rrd-server.pl and rrd-server.cgi. You can find the very latest version of the RRD::Simple Monitoring software that is in live use on rrd.me.uk, here.
If you are using a recent 5.8.x version of Perl, only the following additional modules are required to run the rrd-browse.cgi web interface:
You can enable the caching functionality of the rrd-browse.cgi web interface (and thereby improve performance for larger installations) by simply installing the following additional modules:
Likewise, if you are running a recent version of Perl, the following modules are required to run the rrd-server.pl script (which is called by rrd-server.cgi):
Select a location where you want to install the RRD monitoring software. By default,
the software is configured to be installed under /home/system/rrd/,
/home/nicolaw/webroot/www/rrd.me.uk/ or some other randomly bizarre
location. You will most likely want to change this to something more sane like
/usr/local/rrd-server/. The directory structure under that
installation location should look like the following:
./bin/ - should contain rrd-server.pl and rrd-client.pl./cgi-bin/ - should contain rrd-server.cgi, rrd-browse.cgi and *.tmpl templates./etc/ - should contain graph.defs, create.defs and rrd-httpd.conf./data/ - will contain the .rrd files./graphs/ - will contain the graph images./thumbnails/ - will contain the thumbnail images
Once the files are in place, you will need to make a couple of small changes to the
following files: ./bin/rrd-server.pl, ./cgi-bin/rrd-server.cgi,
./cgi-bin/rrd-browse.cgi and ./etc/rrd-httpd.conf.
You should change any occurrence of /home/system/rrd to reflect your
installation directory. In the case of the three .pl and .cgi files, this will be
located in one place at the top of the file, and will look something like this:
# User defined constants use constant BASEDIR => '/home/system/rrd';
In order for rrd-server.cgi abd rrd-browse.cgi to work, you must allow your web server to
execute them as CGI scripts. The ./etc/rrd-httpd.conf file contains a number
of configuration directives that will allow your Apache web server to access the CGI scripts
under the /cgi-bin/rrd/ URL path on your server. You should either copy and
paste the contents of this config file in to your Apache configuration file as you see fit,
or, if you are running a Fedora Core or RedHat server, you might want to create a symbolic
link to the configuration file like so:
ln -s /home/system/rrd/etc/rrd-httpd.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/rrd-httpd.conf
The rrd-server.cgi and rrd-server.pl scripts only perform data storage functions, and
rrd-browse.cgi will only allow you to navigate the existing graphs and thumbnails. None
of these scripts will automatically create graphs and thumbnails on their own. To generate
the graphs, you will need to run the ./bin/rrd-server.pl script with the
-g and -t parameters. This will create the graphs and thumbnails
respectively. Add the following to your crontab to generate these on a regular basis:
8,18,28,38,48,58 * * * * /home/system/rrd/bin/rrd-server.pl -gt >/dev/null 2>&1
This is a selection of pre-requisite RPMs that have been built using the cpan2rpm script. They were built under RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 ES i386 with perl 5.8.5. Some of these packages may already be available as part of the base RHEL4 install, and others may also be available from the DAG Wieers website at http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/.
These RPMs were built under RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 ES i386 with perl 5.8.8.