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8. Web based statistics

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.


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