Smokeping Guide

This guide will walk you through how to set up smokeping on a raspberry pi using docker and ubuntu server.

Install Ubuntu Server

Download Ubuntu Image

In our example we're using a pi 3, so we'll go and grab their Ubuntu install image from here.

Install Etcher

You can use any variety of programs for this, including something as basic as dd, however for ease of use I recommend using etcher. Once downloaded, install the program.

Write image

Once etcher is installed, unzip the the Ubuntu Server image and use etcher to write it to an SD card. It will prompt you to type in a password, this is normal.

If the SD card was already mounted it may fail, just retry and it should work fine.

Edit pre-boot configuration files

Once etcher has finished, macos will automatically mount the boot partition of the SD card ready for use. Ubuntu server ships with two files in the boot partition to allow customisations such as network config and passwords before first boot:

network-config
user-data

These config files are only used on the first boot, modifying them after first boot will have no effect. If you want to re-apply you must re-flash the SD card or manually edit the pi's configuration files by logging in to it.

network-config

The network-config set up the network interfaces for options such as:

DHCP
Static IP
Wifi Networks

For the purposes of this tutorial it is safe to leave it as standard - this will give the pi a dynamic DHCP address.

user-data

The user-data file is used for a variety of configuration items, such as setting up users, installing packages, configuring hostnames etc. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to do the following things:

Disable automatic password expiry for the default user
set the hostname to smokepi

To do this, edit the user-data config file, find the following section and modify it from:

chpasswd:
  expire: false
  list:
  - ubuntu:ubuntu

To:

chpasswd:
  expire: true
  list:
  - ubuntu:ubuntu

hostname: smokepi

Optionally you could change the default password from ubuntu to password1 by changing it to this instead:

chpasswd:
  expire: true
  list:
  - ubuntu:password1

hostname: smokepi

Clear graphs

sudo rm -rf /opt/smokeping/data/*

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