This section has been added to the Debian version of Cricket for the
benefit of Debian users. Keep the following information in
mind when using this document to configure Cricket on a Debian
system.
This file in intended to help a total beginner get his/her first
installation of Cricket up and running.
If you follow the steps below carefully, you will have a
a minimal installation, following a standard layout. From here,
you can explore on your own. When you need help, it will be easy for
others to help you, since they will be familiar with the beginner setup.
- Insure you have the right version of Perl.
You should be using Perl 5.004 or higher. You can check by running
"perl -V".
- Insure you are on a supported platform.
For your purposes as a beginner, any Unix should work. If you are
using Windows, you must use Windows NT 4.0 (no other variations of
Windows have been tested). If you are using Windows NT, the specific
recommendations about where to put files and the examples will not
make any sense to you. Please follow along and do your best. We'll
hopefully have NT versions of these instructions in the future.
- Install the modules you need.
You need to install the following Perl modules for Cricket to work
correctly.
Module From
--------------------------------------------------------------------
MD5 CPAN: by-authors/id/GAAS/Digest-MD5-*.tar.gz
LWP CPAN: by-authors/id/GAAS/libwww-perl-*.tar.gz
DB_File CPAN: by-authors/id/PMQS/DB_File-*.tar.gz
Date::Parse CPAN: by-authors/id/GBARR/TimeDate-*.tar.gz
Time::HiRes CPAN: by-authors/id/DEWEG/Time-HiRes-*.tar.gz
SNMP_Session http://www.switch.ch/misc/leinen/snmp/perl
RRD http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool
Modules marked with CPAN come from the Comprehensive Perl Archive
Network. If you don't know where to find a CPAN site or how
to install modules, take a look at the Perl FAQ here:
ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/perl/CPAN/doc/FAQs/FAQ/PerlFAQ.html
You may also be able to use CPAN.pm to quickly and
easily install modules. Type "perldoc CPAN" to learn more about it.
Cricket ships with a CPAN-style Bundle which should make it simple to
install the modules you need. The magic command to do this is:
% cd cricket/lib
% perl -I. -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::CricketPrereq'
- Choose a user to run Cricket.
Many sites create a special user to run Cricket, but that's not
necessary. If you choose to run Cricket from your own account
understand that there will be several directories in your home
directory that Cricket needs. Learn to live with them until you know
how to move them elsewhere, or use a dedicated user for Cricket
so that the directories won't bug you.
Do not run Cricket as the root user. Superuser privileges are
not necessary to run Cricket, and granting them would very probably create
a security hole on your system.
If you use a dedicated user for Cricket make certain that mail sent to
that user ends up in your mailbox. Some of Cricket's runtime errors
get reported (with cron's help) via e-mail.
In the examples, this will be the user named "cricket".
- Extract the tarfile and run configure.
Well, you seem to have already done this, since you are reading this
file. Please make certain the expanded directory tree is in the home
directory of the user that will be running Cricket. For example, if
this was Cricket version 1.0.0, it would look like this:
% cd ~cricket
% gunzip -c cricket-1.0.0.tar.gz | tar xvf -
You now need to run "sh configure" from $HOME/cricket-1.0.0 :
% cd ~cricket/cricket-1.0.0
% sh configure
This will fix the Perl scripts to work in your environment.
- Make a softlink to the version you are running.
To make it easier to upgrade later you'll want to make a link from a
generic name to the specific name you are currently running. (Windows
NT 4.0 users can't use this trick. A Win32 shortcut is not the same
thing as a Unix softlink and will not help here.)
To do this:
% cd ~cricket
% ln -s cricket-1.0.0 cricket
This makes it so that you can refer to things in $HOME/cricket, and
still get the version 1.0.0 copies of those files. You'll then be able
to swing that link over to newer versions as they become available.
If you don't have a cricket-conf.pl file yet, copy the example file
cricket-conf.pl.sample to cricket-conf.pl, and edit it. You will need
to set $gCricketHome to the home directory of the user that Cricket
runs as (this is used to locate the cricket-config directory, among
other things). The $gInstallRoot variable should point to where the
Cricket scripts are. It is recommended to point this to the symlink,
so that you can just copy this file if you upgrade Cricket later.
If you followed the instructions so far, $gInstallRoot will be set
correctly without changing the sample, so cricket-conf.pl will contain
these two lines:
$gCricketHome = "/home/cricket";
$gInstallRoot = "$gCricketHome/cricket";
There usually is no need to set $gConfigRoot explicitly, so leave that
line commented out.
Usually, there is no need to touch anything else in this file.
- Copy the sample-config tree and modify it for your site.
Copy the files you intend to use from the sample-config tree from the
cricket distribution to $HOME/cricket-config. You can use
% cd ~cricket
% cp -r cricket/sample-config cricket-config
but the parts of the tree you won't be using immediately may cause some
(otherwise harmless) warnings later on. If you don't copy
the entire tree, make sure to at least include the top
level Defaults file! Let's focus on two
subtrees, routers and router-interfaces. If you can get these going,
you'll be able to get others going too.
- Setup the routers subtree.
Go into the routers tree and look at the targets file. This is where
you want to tell Cricket which router to talk to.
Note: As far as beginners are concerned, statistics are only available
from Cisco routers. If you have another kind of router, you should skip to the
router-interfaces step for now. Later, when you understand the system
better, you can come back and use contributed configurations from other
Cricket users with hardware like yours to make your routers subtree work.
You will be editing the file "Targets" to tell Cricket about your
router. You want to change these lines:
target engineering-router
target-type=Cisco-7500-Router
short-desc = "Router for engineering folks"
You should change the words "engineering-router" in the first line to
the hostname of the router you want to talk to. If it has not been
assigned a hostname, you need to stop and do that (perhaps by simply
editing /etc/hosts) before configuring
Cricket for the first time. Cricket can talk to things via an IP
address, but configuring it that way is beyond the scope of this
document.
You should change the words "Cisco-7500-Router" to reflect the kind of
router you have. You can choose from this list:
- Cisco-2500-Router
- Cisco-3600-Router
- Cisco-7200-Router
- Cisco-7500-Router
If your router type is not on this list, choose "Cisco-2500-Router"
for now. You can experiment with others types later, if you want. The
only difference is the amount of information you get about ambient
temperature where the router is installed.
Comment out the other target in that file (main-router) using the
Cricket comment symbol "#".
Finally, if you are not using the default SNMP community string,
"public", you need to tell Cricket what community string to use. Since
a community string is something that is usually shared across many
network devices, it should live at a higher place in the config
tree. This is a useful feature of the config tree -- it lets you
move things that apply to lots of targets to a single place (higher in
the config tree) where it will be easier to maintain. To set the
community string for your installation, edit the the root Defaults
file, which is ~/cricket-config/Default. It has a section like this in
it:
Target --default--
... other stuff ...
snmp-community = public
Change "public" to your community string. Write the file and exit.
After you make any changes to the config tree, you need to
compile it. Storing it in a compiled form makes accessing it
quicker and easier. Do this:
% ~/cricket/compile
If the compile command give you any errors, stop at this
point and fix the problem. This is a good time to check to
make sure you are logged in to the Cricket user account
(try out the whoami command and see what it says).
Check the FAQ
for more help with errors often seen in this step.
Now, you are ready to try out your configuration. We will run the
collector by hand on just this subtree first to see if there were
any errors.
% ~/cricket/collector /routers
You should see something like this on screen, though this example was
wrapped by hand for readability:
[25-Jan-1999 15:21:20 ] Starting collector: Cricket version 0.64
( Fri May 14 14:14:28 PDT 1999 )
[25-Jan-1999 15:21:20 ] Retrieved data for engineering-router:
19,19,15,22,2510380,49824724
[25-Jan-1999 15:21:20 ] Processed 1 targets in 2 seconds.
You can add the arguments "-logLevel debug" on to the end of the
command-line to get more information to help to solve problems.
- Set up the router-interfaces subtree.
We will setup the router-interfaces subtree in much the same
way that we set up the routers subtree. However, there's a tool
to help us avoid the grunt work. This tool is called 'listInterfaces',
and it comes in the util directory.
listInterfaces one or two arguments. It must have a router name as
the first argument, and it can take a community string as the
second argument. If you do not specify the community string, it
defaults to "public".
When you run listInterfaces against a router, it will print a
Cricket config to it's standard output. Thus, you can use it like
this to save some work:
% ~/cricket/util/listInterfaces engineering-router > interfaces
You should check the automatically generated interfaces file and
make certain it only lists interfaces you are interested in.
By adding this file, you've just changed the config tree. Remember,
you must compile the tree every time you edit it. Or rather, if you
forget to compile the tree, the Cricket collector will do it for you,
but in that case you are not likely to see any errors you might have
introduced, so it's always a good idea to compile explicitly.
Once again, run the collector by hand to make certain that it will
be able to talk to your router and collect data. The command
to do this is:
% ~/cricket/collector /router-interfaces
Once again, you should see that Cricket is successfully retrieving
data for your targets.
- Run the collector from cron
Now you need to set up cron to run the collector every five minutes
for you.
The collector is usually run from a wrapper program whose
job it is to handle locking, rotating log files, and other
administivia.
The wrapper is called collect-subtrees. It reads a file from the
Cricket install directory called "subtree-sets". This file holds
lists of subtrees which will get processed together in a group.
It also lists the places where Cricket will expect to find it's
configuration and log directory. As it comes in the distribution,
this file needs no changes.
Later, you will find that this file lets you control what
parts of your config tree will be collected in parallel. This
is a critical feature to increase the number of devices you can
poll.
You'll need to add an entry like this to cron:
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * *
$HOME/cricket/collect-subtrees normal
Usually, this is done by typing "crontab -e". In the crontab,
it will all be on one line. It has been manually wrapped above
for readability.
If the script generates output, it will be sent to the user
who owns the crontab. You should make certain you can see that
mail. If you don't see the mail, you won't know what's wrong
(though most of the messages you are likely to see will also
show up in the $HOME/cricket-logs directory).
- Set up the Grapher
For this part of the installation, you will need an installation
of Apache running which is correctly configured to let you run CGI
scripts linked into your $HOME/public_html directory via
a symlink.
Configuring the web server correctly has proven to be the
hardest for beginning Cricket users. Here are some resources
that might help you get it right:
Please do not continue until you are certain things are configured
correctly.
Hint: if you are using a vanilla RedHat
Linux install, you are not ready to continue until you do something about
suEXEC.
See the Cricket FAQ
for more info.
OK, now that you have Apache (or some other web server) correctly
installed, you need to make some more links.
% cd $HOME/public_html
% mkdir cricket
% cd cricket
% ln -s $HOME/cricket/VERSION .
% ln -s $HOME/cricket/grapher.cgi .
% ln -s $HOME/cricket/mini-graph.cgi .
% ln -s $HOME/cricket/lib .
% ln -s $HOME/cricket/images .
These links expose the minimal amount of Cricket necessary to the
web server.
Now, try going to this URL:
http://localhost/~cricket/cricket/grapher.cgi
If you are running under a different user, or your webserver
is on a different machine from your web browser, alter the
URL accordingly. Additionally, if you want to get rid of the username
reference in the URL (i.e., the ~cricket bit), using another
method to start grapher.cgi, you'll have to edit grapher.cgi and
uncomment the lines
# $ENV{'HOME'} = '/path/to/cricket/home';
# return;
and replace /path/to/cricket/home with the directory you
actually installed Cricket in.
You should see the front page, including some graphics and a
couple of links to more stuff. If you get a web server error
page instead you MUST go check the web server error log. The
answer to what went wrong will almost certainly be in there.
- You're done!
The graphs will not show any data for a while, since it takes
some time to have enough history to make an interesting graph.
As long as you are certain the collector is working right (now
would be a very good time to check your e-mail for errors, and
scan the files in $HOME/cricket-logs for errors) then you can
take some time to read the other documentation, or maybe even
grab a beer.
After about an hour, you should have some mildly
interesting graphs. After a day, hopefully you'll have some
very interesting graphs. After three months, you'll finally
have graphs that you can show to your boss to prove that you
need to upgrade the office's 384 kilobit DSL to a T3. We're pulling
for you, really we are. :)
- The Next Step
Now that you are an expert (expert beginner, that is),
you should add some more targets to your
config tree, and explore the other subtrees in the sample-config
tree. With those subtrees, you can monitor web server performance,
switch port usage, and other interesting stuff.
As you learn more,
you'll be able to make your own subtrees to handle special kinds of
data unique to your site. If you make a subtree that can support
a device others are using, please submit to the Cricket contributed
configurations site, which is part of Cricket's homepage at
http://cricket.sourceforge.net.
Cricket
version 1.0.3, released 2001-11-06.
Copyright (C) 1998-2000 Jeff Allen. Cricket is released under
the GNU General Public License.