Big Sister - Q+A

- The "diskload" test does not work on my Windows system
- The "diskfree" test does not work on my Windows 2000 system
- Trend graphs do not appear though I followed the instructions on setting them up
- Can I have some graphics showing disk/memory/cpu/... usage during the last few days?
- No links to my performance data trend graphics are appearing on the web pages
- Links to trend graphics appear but when I click on it no graph is displayed
- After installing Big Sister my display works but I do not see any status from my clients
- Some of my web pages look quite poor (no background, no lamps) while others look fine
- The History and Alarms menu entries do not work
- CGIs are so slow
- The .conn (ping) test does always report failure
- My display.history file is growing larger and larger

## The "diskload" test does not work on my Windows system

    The "diskload" test is broken and will be removed in
    future releases. If you can send me a complete documentation
    of the Windows performance monitor API I will consider
    fixing the test.

## The "diskfree" test does not work on my Windows 2000 system

    You have to switch on the disk performance monitor of your
    Windows box by executing the command

    	diskperf -Y

    in a command window.

    You might also have to start the "Performance Logs and Alerts"
    service.

## Trend graphs do not appear though I followed the instructions on setting them up

    The most common problem with graphing is that Big Sister just
    cannot find the "rrdtool" command. Please check your syslog
    (/var/log/messages, /var/adm/messages, whatever) to see if
    Big Sister logged something like

        Jun 19 18:30:02 susix bsmon: RRD creation failed for graph

    In this case either change Big Sister's path settings
    (in the adm/resources) or copy rrdtool to some place Big
    Sister finds it by default, e.g. /usr/bin.

## Can I have some graphics showing disk/memory/cpu/... usage during the last few days?

    Big Sister 0.38 introduced agent side performance data
    and finally since 0.94 the server module supporting storing
    this data in a database and creating nice trend graphics
    is working. See the HOWTO section on performance data
    collection for more details.

## No links to my performance data trend graphics are appearing on the web pages

    Check if the directories var/graphs and www/graphs exist and
    contain files. If not you have not successfully enabled
    performance data collection (see above). If yes, then it
    might just take some time for the links to appear on your
    status web pages. Note that the status pages will not be
    updated immediately if a graph is created - it will be
    included when the status page is updated next time because
    of status changes.

## Links to trend graphics appear but when I click on it no graph is displayed

    Check if you really have RRDTool installed. Note that the
    'rrdtool' command must be in the path of both the Big Sister
    server and your web server.

## After installing Big Sister my display works but I do not see any status from my clients

    The Big Sister client "uxmon" will read its config file
    adm/uxmon-net on startup. It expects the Big Sister
    status collector (display server) listed there. After
    a new installation you will find a line:

    	bsdisplay	bsdisplay

    there. Please change the left "bsdisplay" to the name
    or IP address of your display server.

## Some of my web pages look quite poor (no background, no lamps) while others look fine

    Big Sister needs to know the URL of its web pages. If you
    did not tell it during installation using e.g.

    	make install WEBROOT=/monitors/bs ...

    or you moved your web pages to a new location then you
    should try altering the file

    	www/skins/default/WEBROOT.inc

    BTW: It is not necessary to list a full URL (http://...).
         The absolute path within your server is sufficient.

## The History and Alarms menu entries do not work

    Some features of Big Sister rely on CGIs. Please
    remember to do the following steps:

    	- decide where to put your Big Sister's CGIs.
    	  It might be a good idea to separate them
    	  from your other CGIs.

    	- Set up your web server so that it will
    	  execute CGIs in the respective locations
    	  and follow symbolic links.

    	- Create the physical directory where you
    	  want your Big Sister CGIs to be in and
    	  place symbolic links pointing to the
    	  Big Sister CGIs (bin/bshistory,
    	  bin/bswebalarm, etc., see README)

    	- During installation of Big Sister point
    	  Big Sister to your CGI URL using e.g.

    		make install CGIPATH=/cgi

## CGIs are so slow

    While sharing code and using the skin mechanism is
    a fine thing for program developers it makes startup
    of scripts a little bit slow. While there is no way
    around this you can reduce the number of script
    startup by using Fast CGI. You need to do two steps
    to enable running Big Sister CGIs in Fast CGI mode:

    	- enable your web server executing scripts
    	  in Fast CGI mode (e.g. for apache users:
    	  install the mod_fastcgi module available
    	  from www.fastcgi.com and do a few
    	  configuration changes)

    	- install the FCGI perl module (available
    	  from CPAN sites)

## The .conn (ping) test does always report failure

    By default the ping test will use UDP protocol. On
    most machines the ICMP echo service is built in the
    network driver at a very low level and will just work
    (I've even saw some SPARC boxes answering ICMP echo
    requests after being brought down to PROM mode!). The
    UDP and TCP echo services are only working if configured.
    On a Unix system they will have to be enabled in
    /etc/inetd.conf. On NT systems the "Simple TCP/IP"
    service will have to run.

    If you rather like to use ICMP pings than to tell your
    boxes to answer UDP echo requests then you will have
    to use the ping test as:

    	mybox	proto=icmp ping

    Since usually processes running with user priviledges
    will not get access to the ICMP protocol layer uxmon
    has to be run with root priviledges in this case. Do
    a

    	touch adm/uxmon-asroot

    in your Big Sister directory and restart uxmon. This
    will run uxmon with root priviledges.

    Decide yourself which does suit your security policies
    best: running uxmon as root or enabling Echo services
    on all the machines you want to monitor.

    Note: Older versions of uxmon did not implement the
    "proto=icmp" option of ping correctly. This hase been
    fixed in release 0.30.

## My display.history file is growing larger and larger

    Since version 0.32 bbd implements a method for rotating
    its log files. However you need to tell bbd manually to
    execute it using

    	bsadmin -d mybbdhost savelogs

    (see the How To on log file rotation in HOWTO too)