Web based statistics

Generic installation

From version 1.50, you can use the freeware software MRTG to produce really nice graphical statistics on your web site. For an example try http://www.gb7mbc.net/mrtg/stats.html.

The following should help you get it all working.

First you need to download the latest version of MRTG from http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/. You will also need the following files..

libpng-1.0.14.tar.gz
zlib-1.1.4.tar.gz
gd-1.8.3.tar.gz

Login to your machine as the root user, put all the downloaded files in /usr/local/src/ (or wherever you prefer) and untar and compile them. All the information to compile and install these sources come with them. After compilation and installation, you will find MRTG in /usr/local/mrtg-2.

Now copy all the files in /usr/local/src/mrtg-2.9.22/images/ to /spider/html/mrtg/

You now need to make 2 symbolic links like below...

ln -s /usr/local/mrtg-2/bin/mrtg /usr/bin/mrtg
ln -s /usr/local/mrtg-2/lib/mrtg2 /usr/lib/mrtg2

Now login to the cluster with your sysop callsign and run the command "mrtg all".

Now you are nearly there! Login as the sysop user and change to the /spider/html/mrtg/ directory. Now run the command indexmaker as shown below...

indexmaker --output stats.html --columns=1 --title "MRTG statistics for GB7DJK" ../../mrtg/mrtg.cfg

Changing the callsign for your own cluster callsign of course!

And finally you need to login as the root user and create one last symbolic link. Where this points will depend on where your html documents are kept. For RedHat systems you use...

ln -s /home/sysop/spider/html/mrtg /home/httpd/html/mrtg

and for SuSE systems...

ln -s /home/sysop/spider/html/mrtg /usr/local/httpd/htdocs/mrtg

If you now point your browser to your website as below it should all be happening!

http://www.xxx.xxx/mrtg/stats.html

Of course, to get the stats to update, you need to add some information in the spider crontab file as below...

# Update stats for mrtg on website
00,05,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * run_cmd('mrtg all')

This will update the site every 5 minutes.

Ubuntu 8.04 Installation

To install on the latest versions of Ubuntu (8.04 at the time of writing) is really very simple. Either use Synaptic or apt-get install to get the latest mrtg. Once you have done this and it is installed, do the following..

chmod 01777 /var/lock mrtg /var/lib/mrtg

Now log into the cluster using your sysop console and issue the command..

mrtg all

log in at the command line as the user 'sysop' and type the following commands..

cd /spider/html/mrtg

indexmaker --output stats.html --columns=1 --title "MRTG statistics for GB7DJK" ../../mrtg/mrtg.cfg

Making sure you change GB7DJK to your own cluster node call!

Finally create the following symlink

ln -s /home/sysop/spider/html/mrtg /var/www/mrtg

and all should now be working! You can create a crontab entry as above.

Web based statistics