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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.

Prerequisite Software

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:

• Config-General-2.31.tar.gz
• HTML-Template-2.8.tar.gz
• HTML-Template-Expr-0.07.tar.gz
• Parse-RecDescent-1.94.tar.gz

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):

• Module-Build-0.2801.tar.gz
• RRD-Simple-1.39.tar.gz - RRD::Simple requires RRDtool to be installed. See the RRD::Simple INSTALL document for details. You will need to install RRDtool version 1.2.x or higher.

Selecting an Installation Location

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/. 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

Create these directories in your install directory, and copy the files in to the relevant directories. Remember to check that you have set execute permissions for the .pl and .cgi scripts.

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';

Setting up rrd-server.cgi & rrd-browse.cgi

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

Restarting your Apache web server afterwards should make these scripts visible.

Automating Graph & Thumbnail Creation

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