11 KiB
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
1. Download Ubuntu Image
In our example we're using a pi 3, so we'll go and grab their Ubuntu install image from here. When choosing the image, I recommend using 64 bit.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Edit pre-boot configuration files
Once etcher has finished, your OS will automatically mount the boot partition of the SD card ready for use (if it doesn't, simply remove and reconnect your SD card from your machine). Ubuntu server ships with two files in the boot partition to allow customisations such as network config and passwords before first boot:
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: true
list:
- ubuntu:ubuntu
To:
chpasswd:
expire: false
list:
- ubuntu:ubuntu
hostname: smokepi
Optionally you could change the default user from ubuntu to adam and the default password from ubuntu to password1 by changing it to this instead:
chpasswd:
expire: true
list:
- adam:password1
hostname: smokepi
5. First boot
Once the pi has booted, we must wait for it to stop installing updates before we can continue. To check this, run the following command:
while true; do date; ps aux | grep unattended; sleep 5; done
This will start a never-ending command that will print all processes matching "unattended" back to the console. When updates are complete, it should simply return two lines that match.
6. Install Docker
This section was taken from docker's own documentation available here.
Install pre-requisites
First we must install the packages that Ubuntu needs in order to configure the docker repository:
sudo apt-get install \
apt-transport-https \
ca-certificates \
curl \
gnupg-agent \
software-properties-common
Add Docker GPG key
Next we must install Docker's GPG key so that your pi trusts the docker packages it is about to install:
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add -
Add Docker repositories
Now we will install the docker packages. If you installed 64 bit Ubuntu (recommended), run:
sudo add-apt-repository \
"deb [arch=arm64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(lsb_release -cs) \
stable"
If you installed 32 bit Ubuntu, run:
sudo add-apt-repository \
"deb [arch=armhf] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
$(lsb_release -cs) \
stable"
Install Docker packages
Now we must install docker itself with the following commands:
sudo apt update
sudo apt install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-compose
Add ubuntu user to docker groups
Now we must add the ubuntu user to the docker group. Doing this ensures that you can run the docker command without prefixing it with sudo:
usermod -aG docker ubuntu
Once this is done you will need to disconnect and reconnect your ssh connection in order for your user's group membership to be picked up.
If you changed the username in the user-data, change ubuntu for whichever username you chose.
Test that docker is working
Finally you should check that docker is up and running by running docker ps. Below is what the output should look like when running the command:
ubuntu@smokepi:~/ $ docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
7. Set up mDNS
This step is optional, however it ensures that the smokeping will be available at http://smokepi.local once we're finished installing smokeping, so it is advisable. Install the following packages:
sudo apt install avahi-daemon libnss-mdns mdns-scan
Install smokeping
We're going to set up smokeping by using linuxserver's smokeping container on docker hub.
1. Create smokeping user
We are going to create a smokeping user so that the container can store it's files in a folder it has permissions to:
useradd smokeping
2. Create folder structure
We're going to create a few directories in /opt/ for smokeping to store it's data in:
mkdir -p /opt/smokeping/{data,config,compose}
Verify that all folders are there with ls /opt/smokeping, it should look something like this:
ubuntu@smokepi:~/ $ ls /opt/smokeping
compose config data
3. Change ownership of folders
Now we will change the ownership of the folders config and data so that they're owned by the smokeping user & group:
sudo chown smokeping:smokeping /opt/smokeping/{config,data}
4. Create docker-compose file
Now we will create the file docker-compose.yaml. Before we do we need to find the ID of the smokeping user, so that we can update the docker-compose file with this information. run id smokeping to find out smokeping's user ID:
ubuntu@smokepi:~/ $ id smokeping
uid=1001(smokeping) gid=1001(smokeping) groups=1001(smokeping)
You can see from the above output that the smokeping user & group ID is 1001. Using this information, we will open an editor with the command sudo nano /opt/smokeping/compose/docker-compose.yaml and paste the following content:
---
version: "2.1"
services:
smokeping:
image: linuxserver/smokeping
container_name: smokeping
environment:
- PUID=1001
- PGID=1001
- TZ=Europe/London
volumes:
- /opt/smokeping/config:/config
- /opt/smokeping/data:/data
ports:
- 80:80
Ensuring that PUID & PGID variables under the environment section are updated to match the output of the command id smokeping we ran earlier.
5. Start smokeping
Now we are ready to start smokeping:
docker-compose -f /opt/smokeping/compose/docker-compose.yaml -d
Once the command has completed you can confirm it's running using docker ps, the output should look something like as follows:
ubuntu@smokepi:~$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID IMAGE COMMAND CREATED STATUS PORTS NAMES
1ee540a613a2 linuxserver/smokeping "/init" 2 hours ago Up 2 hours 0.0.0.0:80->80/tcp smokeping
Congratulations! You should now be able to access your smokeping installation via a browser at http://smokepi.local. Smokeping should stay up until you tell it to stop, and should survive the pi being restarted.
Smokeping Configuration & Maintenance
Starting, stopping, restarting, destroying:
The following commands will allow you to start, stop, restart or destroy smokeping:
# Start smokeping
docker-compose -f /opt/smokeping/compose/docker-compose.yaml up -d
# Stop smokeping
docker-compose -f /opt/smokeping/compose/docker-compose.yaml stop
# Restart smokeping
docker-compose -f /opt/smokeping/compose/docker-compose.yaml restart
# Destroy smokeping
docker-compose -f /opt/smokeping/compose/docker-compose.yaml down
Even the destroy command will not remove data in /opt/smokeping, so all the above commands are safe to run.
Configuration files
Smokeping has now stored a copy of it's configuration files in /opt/smokeping/config, on a default install the folder contents should look something like this:
ubuntu@smokepi:~$ ls /opt/smokeping/config/
Alerts Database General Presentation Probes Slaves Targets httpd.conf pathnames site-confs ssmtp.conf
After editing any of the below files, be sure to restart smokeping for the changes to take effect.
/opt/smokeping/config/Probes
The Probes file defines the commands used to monitor hosts. Here's mine as an example:
*** Probes ***
+ FPing
binary = /usr/sbin/fping
+ Curl
binary = /usr/bin/curl
agent = User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/83.0.4103.116 Safari/537.36
extraargs = -s
urlformat = http://%host%/
follow_redirects = yes
include_redirects = yes
require_zero_status = yes
pings = 4
The Fping section is standard, however I have made some modifications to the Curl section that I recommend adopting so that you don't end up connecting to sites to often and being marked as a robot (e.g. the pings setting has been reduced from a default 20 to 4). I have also set a agent string to a desktop string for the same reason.
/opt/smokeping/config/Targets
The Targets file defines the menu layout and hosts you will be monitoring.
HTTP
For instance I added a new menu item called "Custom HTTP" and added the bbc news website in my configuration file as so:
+ Custom_http
probe = Curl
menu = Custom http
title = Custom http
++ bbcnews
menu = BBC News
title = BBC News
host = bbcnews.co.uk
Note that because I specified Curl as the probe under Custom_http, all child entries below it have inherited this setting. This means that, rather than smokeping pinging bbcnews.co.uk with an icmp packet, it instead will try and connect to the web server and report back whether or not it was successful.
Standard ping
Fping is the standard probe and so, if you don't define a probe at any level, it will always ping with icmp. Below is an example with a menu item "DNS" with a google dns server as a host, that uses ping by default:
+ DNS
menu = DNS
title = DNS
++ GoogleDNS1
menu = Google DNS 1
title = Google DNS 8.8.8.8
host = 8.8.8.8
Clear graphs
To clear graph data, simply clear data folder like so:
sudo rm -rf /opt/smokeping/data/*