Monitoring Network Latency With Smokeping (Ubuntu 9.04)

This document comes without warranty of any kind! I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Preliminary Note

I have tested this on an Ubuntu 9.04 system. I will use the hostname www.example.com for this system in this tutorial. We need a web server on the system to display the graphs. I will install Apache2 and use Apache's default vhost for hosting the graphs. If you use a different vhost, you might have to adjust its settings or copy the smokeping.cgi script from /usr/lib/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi to the appropriate location.

I'm running all the steps in this tutorial with root privileges, so make sure you're logged in as root:

sudo su

2 Installing Smokeping

To install Smokeping along with some other recommended packages, we simply run:

aptitude install smokeping curl libauthen-radius-perl libnet-ldap-perl libnet-dns-perl libio-socket-ssl-perl libnet-telnet-perl libsocket6-perl libio-socket-inet6-perl apache2

3 Configuring Smokeping

The Smokeping configuration is in the file /etc/smokeping/config. This file just includes some other files from the /etc/smokeping/config.d directory so we have to modify these files. First we modify /etc/smokeping/config.d/General. In this file, you find some email settings and the URL of the Smokeping web interface. Change them like this:

continua...