Installation Instructions for Windows Users ------------------------------------------- This is a step-by-step guide for windows users (NT, 2000, XP) in order to install and use this software. You are expected to have a certain level of Systems Administration knowledge! 1. Prerequisite software. In order to use routers.cgi, you must first install certain prerequisite software. Make sure all of these are installed before continuing to step 2. 1.1. A web server You can install IIS from your server disk, or, if you are not using the server version of the operating system, then download the Windows version of Apache web server from http://www.apache.org/ This comes with it's own installation instructions. Check your web server is up and running correctly, and displaying its default page to your browser. If using Apache, make sure you have mod_expires installed (you probably have, it is the default). 1.2. ActivePerl Download and install ActivePerl from the http://www.activestate.com/ web site. Remember to also configure the .pl extension to be associated with the perl.exe executable, and configure your web server to support Perl CGI scripts. The ActiveState site has full instructions for how to do this. You should be able to test your perl installation. Put the following line into a file called 'test.pl' and try to run it. print "Hello, world \n"; 1.3. MRTG and RRDTool These can be downloaded from Tobi's sites at http://www.mrtg.org/ and http://www.rrdtool.org/ Make sure you install the RRDTool Perl libraries correctly, instructions for this are included with the RRDTool documentation. 1.4. Perl GD libraries These can be installed via the ppm package manager. Use the command ppm install GD and they will be downloaded and installed. If you use a proxy server for internet access then you will first need to set the proxy environment variables - see the PPM documentation. If you have problems at this step, then do not worry - you can always disable the 'compact summary' option of routers.cgi and the GD libraries will not be required. 2. Configure MRTG Full documentation for this step is available with the MRTG documentation. You should always have the line Logformat: rrdtool in your configuration files, to make the system use RRDTool format logs. Also, routers.cgi works better when you have one configuration file per device, although you can subsequently call them for update via a dummy file that uses the Include: directive to include all the sub-files. I would suggest that you place your MRTG .cfg files in a separate folder, or folders, for neatness. If you have a lot of files and wish to use grouping, then place them in different subfolders of the main folder. Once you have set up your MRTG files, run MRTG for a few minutes to create the rrd files and initially update them. This also verifies your MRTG file configuration before you move on to configure the routers.cgi frontend. Verify that you have your .rrd files created, and that there were no errors when running MRTG. 3. Install routers.cgi To install routers.cgi, first unpack the archive (you have probably already done this) using software such as WinZip from http://www.winzip.com/ Next, run the installation script install.pl and this should take care of the installation, provided you have installed the prerequisite software in the usual place. If not, you may have to tell the install script where to find the various parts of your system, Take note of any extra messages you receive while installing and at the end, as these may give you extra instructions. Particularly, Apache users will have to set some expiry options, and all users will probably want to check the permissions on created directories. 4. Test the web interface Do this from a web browser. Assuming your server is called 'myserver', and you have the default web server configuration, then you should be able to give your browser the URL http://myserver/cgi-bin/routers2.pl and you will see the menu page with the graph of your first target. The graph will probably be all grey at the moment, since the data has not yet been collected. If you receive an error message about 'rrd file not found' then you probably have not yet run MRTG successfully to create the rrd database. The PROBLEMS file has a lot of extra help to track down any problems you have at this stage. You may also wish to look at the page on http://myserver/cgi-bin/routers2.pl?page=verify which will run some extra tests on your configuration - provided, of course, that you have the web server installed and configured correctly! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------