mrtg-nw-guide (1) Linux Manual Page

NAME

mrtg-nw-guide – MRTG for NetWare

SYNOPSIS

This guide is intended to aid in the installation and configuration of MRTG on a NetWare server.

OVERVIEW

MRTG is a relative newcomer to the NetWare platform. Earlier versions of NetWare could not run MRTG natively for several reasons:

•

Absence of NetWare OS support in the MRTG package.

•

A NetWare server commandline length limitation.

•

Absence of the Rateup executable (Rateup.nlm).

•

A standard installation method.

•

Problems with NetWare’s implementation of Perl.

Support for the NetWare OS has now been fully added into MRTG, beginning with MRTG release 2.12.2.

Liberallly minded operating systems support a commandline length approaching 1000 characters. In such environments it was an easy matter to pass the sometimes high number of parameters used by MRTG‘s Rateup executable directly on the commandline. Until NetWare 6.5, NetWare had a commandline limit of 512 characters. This limitation was also removed for NetWare 6.0 by Service Pack 5. For other NetWare versions and earlier Service Packs, this limitation remains. To permit a ‘standard’ interface for NetWare, the Rateup executable has been modified to also read its parameters from a file, and the MRTG script has been modified to support this method on a NetWare platform. (See New Rateup Switch)

A Rateup NLM is now available, along with the necessary scripts to build it if required. See the NetWare Support section of this document for further details. Additionally, mrtg.pl has been revised because of the unique (to NetWare) name of executables (NLM).

The absence of a specific installation procedure has caused MRTG to fail in the past because the Perl script could not find or load the Rateup executable. The installation method supplied here will solve this problem for now.

The MRTG.pl script in the 2.12.2 (or later) version of MRTG has been configured to suit all likely versions of NetWare able to use Perl5, and bypasses all of the known problems with NetWare Perl running MRTG.

PREREQUISITES

You will need the following:

•

Perl 5.8.0 for NetWare with latest Perl Updates (February, 2005 or later; previous versions MAY work)

•

NetWare 5.1 w/ SP8, NetWare 6.0 w/ SP5 or NetWare 6.5 w/ SP2.

•

A copy of the MRTG Package (v2.12.2 at time of writting)

•

Three .ncf files to execute the Perl scripts at the NetWare server console.

•

A copy of the Rateup NLM (Pre-built or compiled)

•

Optionally, any NetWare supported Web Server (Netscape, Apache 1.3 or 2.0)

For copies of the .ncf files and Rateup NLM, see NetWare Support in this document.

INSTALLING MRTG

1.

Install the latest Perl 5.8.x release on your server. See the Perl documentation for details.

2.

Create the following directories:

         SYS:/Mrtg
         SYS:/Mrtg/bin
         SYS:/Mrtg/contrib    (Optional for this document)
         SYS:/Mrtg/doc        (Optional for this document)
         SYS:/Mrtg/html
         SYS:/Mrtg/html/images
         SYS:/Mrtg/html/work
         SYS:/Mrtg/lib
         SYS:/Mrtg/logs
         SYS:/Mrtg/translate

3.

Copy from the MRTG package the following files:

 in\*        to  SYS:/Mrtg/bin              All files. See Note 1.

Note 1: Add a .pl extension to the mrtg, cfgmaker and indexmaker files. The rateup.exe will NOT be needed on the NetWare server.