[Bigsister-general] Graphs on W2K

["Robert W. Kramer III" <suppressed>]

I am running Big Sister monitor, agent and server on W2k Advanced Server.
I've found several problems with a Windows setup of BS.

For one thing, I run my all of my web pages from the D: on this box. The
pre-compiled version assumes everything is being ran from the C: and this
doesn't work for me, so I downloaded the source code for BS and compiled it
on my laptop using CYGWIN. I still had to make some changes manually. For
example, all of the cgi/ scripts could not find the bigsister/common.pm
include. I had to change the paths in these files to
D:/inetpub/www.mydomain.com/bs.

Also had a problem with the scripts in the /cgi folder. IIS doesn't appear
to have a way to map a document without specifying a file extension. The
easiest way to overcome this was to just rename all the /cgi/ scripts so
they ended with .cgi and then configure IIS to map those extensions to perl
as usual. Of course, this required me to make some changes to the html
template for the skin I am using. This all seems to work.

At this point, when I click on the little graph icon to view a host's graph,
I see a form with a list of available graphs and time period columns to
choose from. I've tried every combination possible, but when I click the
View button I get a page that lists the host name at the top, followed by a
form to select the time period and zoom factor - but only a small image icon
with a red "x". The graph does not appear. This form seems to use the
bsgraph script.

Another method used the bshistgraph script. This one is used when you click
the ">>" arrows at the end of the graph form. When I click on these ">>"
arrows I get a page that allows me to specify a date range. The default
dates are the apparent beginning date and time I started monitoring with BS
to the current date and time. So I click the Ok button. What I see next is a
page that allows quite a few settings to be made. There are 3 sections on
the page. Chart, Options and Data Export. Clicking either of the two Display
buttons simply reloads the page. The CSV Download button at the bottom
initiates a download, but the resulting file (loaded in MS Excel) is blank.

There are no errors generated, nor is there any graphic icon with a red "x"
on it. The title of this page appears correct - "Char for 10.10.20.169: Ping
Package Loss". I suspect the graph is supposed to be showing on this page
along with the optional settings, but there is no graph.

Yet, there is data:

  www/graphs/ fills up with .html files for each host I monitor.
  var/graphs/ files up with .graph and .rrd files for each host I monitor.
The .rrd files are updated frequently.

After viewing bshistgraph source code it appeared that the hostid routine
wanted a database. So I configured db.cfg as per BS docs. Once I did this
and restarted BS daemons I see that the bsmondb/ folder I created has 3
files in it: host, perfinfo and variable. All thress of these files have
what appears to be legit data. The perfinfo file gets updated frequently.

I installed the RRDs.pm using PPM. (We use ActiveState Perl, 5.8). When
graphs didn't display I decided to uninstall the RRDs perl module and place
rrdtool.exe in my path. Restarted all BS daemons and the results were the
same. I tried running both the perl module and the rrdtool.exe. Same
results.

By all counts, BS is monitoring my hosts and writing the data correctly, but
no graphs are being created.

I don't know how to test RRD to know if it's working correctly - I have no
sample data/script, but nothing errors out.

I'm excited and anxous about using BS, but the lack of the graphs means it's
broke for us and I've exhausted myself to find a reason for it. Can anyone
please help me figure out what isn't right?

Bob


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