Keywords: Big Sister, Bigsister, Network Monitor, Network Monitoring, Perl, GPL, Big Brother, manual, SNMP

Chapter 4. Appendices
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## Chapter 4. Appendices

## Question and Answers : Q+A

### 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 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 ( 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 ) - 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 too)

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