# Installing Xymon

This describes how to setup a Xymon server for monitoring your systems. It assumes that you are setting up a full Xymon server - i.e. either you do not have a Big Brother server, or you will replace it completely with Xymon.

Note to Big Brother users: Although some of the Xymon tools have evolved from the bbgen toolkit that was used on top of a Big Brother server installation, the Xymon versions of these tools now require that you run Xymon - not Big Brother. If you are migrating from Big Brother to Xymon, then you should follow the migration guide.

## Prerequisites - before you install Xymon

You may want to check the list of common systems which has brief instructions for installing Xymon for these types of systems.

There are a few things you should check before you begin to install Xymon. Don't be scared of the number of items here - it is likely that you already have most or all of it in place.

#### A webbrowser capable of handling HTML 4, JavaScript and CSS

This includes most browsers available today - Internet Explorer 5 or later, all Mozilla/Firefox versions, Konqueror, Netscape 6 and several others. The old Netscape 4.x browsers are known NOT to work.

#### A Unix-like operating system

Xymon is written for Unix-based systems, e.g. Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris. It will probably work on any Unix-like system that supports the Unix System V IPC mechanisms (shared memory, semaphores) - that should be just about anything Unix-like you are likely to have.

#### Sufficient SYSV IPC resources on your system

Xymon uses 8 shared memory segments, ranging in size from 32 KB to 512 KB (2336 KB total) in the default configuration; and 8 sets of 3 semaphores. Experience shows that some systems need tuning to provide the necessary IPC resources that Xymon uses. Specifically, when installing on Solaris you must increase the "shmseg" kernel parameter from the default 6 to at least 8. Since other programs on your system may also use shared memory, a higher value may be required. See http://www.xymon.com/archive/2005/08/msg00183.html for more information about these issues.

#### A webserver

Xymon is designed with a web-based front-end. So you should have a webserver such as Apache running on the server where you install Xymon.

#### A working C compiler, GNU make.

Xymon is written in C, so you need a working C compiler, e.g. gcc. You will also need a "make" utility - many systems have one by default, but you need to use the GNU make utility. On some systems, this is pre-installed as "gmake" or "gnumake". The configure-script checks this for you.

HP-UX users should note that the HP-supplied C compiler is known to mis-compile the lib/environ.c file, and produces an output file lib/environ.o of length 0 bytes. HP-UX users on the Xymon mailing list agree that the default C compiler shipped with HP-UX should not be used to compile Xymon - it is only for re-building the HP-UX kernel. The GNU C compiler works fine on HP-UX. More details in this e-mail from the Xymon mailing list.

#### PCRE, RRDtool, OpenSSL, OpenLDAP libraries.

Xymon relies on a number of Open-Source libraries - these must be installed before you start building Xymon. On many systems you already have these pre-installed - they are commonly installed by default on Linux systems, and FreeBSD has all of them in the "ports" collection.

Note: Although many systems have these libraries pre-installed, they often include only the run-time libraries and not the files that are needed to compile and build programs such as Xymon. So if you think you have all of these libraries installed but Xymon will not build, do check that you have the development files installed as well. Often these are in packages called "something-dev".

- PCRE - Perl Compatible Regular Expression library - is a library for matching text-strings. It is available from http://www.pcre.org/
- RRDtool is a library for handling the Round-Robin Databases used to hold the historical data Xymon gathers. It is available from http://www.mrtg.org/rrdtool/. Xymon has been tested with version 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 of RRDtool, so use one of these - many Linux- and *BSD-systems have pre-packaged versions of it.
  Note that RRDtool requires various graphics-libraries. RRDtool 1.2.x uses libpng, newer versions rely on the Cairo graphics library.
- OpenSSL is a library for communicating with network services, that use SSL encryption - e.g. secure websites. Although this library is not absolutely required for Xymon, I strongly recommend that you install it because sooner or later you will probably need it anyway. It is available from http://www.openssl.org/. Note: If you are building on Solaris, you should check that you have a random-data generator, either the prngd daemon (available on Sun Freeware) or the Solaris /dev/random driver from Solaris patch 112438.
- OpenLDAP is used to query LDAP directory servers. If you would like to test that your directory server is up and running, you will need this library. It is available from http://www.openldap.org/

The configure-script will attempt to locate all of these libraries on your system, and complain if the required ones are missing.

#### A "xymon" userid on your system

A core element of Xymon is a network daemon. To keep your system secure and limit the amount of damage that can be done if someone finds a security problem in Xymon, I strongly recommend that you create a dedicated userid for the Xymon programs. This user should not be a member of any other groups on your system.

Xymon will install the xymonping tool as setuid-root(only on the Xymon server). This program requires root privileges to be able to perform network "ping" tests. It will drop root privileges immediately after obtaining the network socket needed for this, and will not run with root privileges at all while handling network traffic or doing file I/O.

## Building Xymon

After unpacking Xymon from the tar-file, run the `configure` script. This script asks a series of questions, but all of the questions have a reasonable default response. So if you are in doubt about what to answer, use the default setting. You can see what it looks like.

When the configure script finishes, it tells you to run `make` to build the Xymon programs. If your default "make" tool is not GNU make, you should use the command for running GNU make instead, e.g. `gmake`. You will now see a lot of commands being run to build the programs, it usually takes a minute or two.

When it is finished, you finish the installation by running `make install`.

The first time you run `make install`, besides installing the Xymon programs it also creates the default directory structure used by Xymon, and installs an initial set of configuration files that you can use as the basis for setting up monitoring of your entire network.

It is safe to run `make install` when upgrading a Xymon server. It installs the programs, adds new template-files that were not present in your previous version, and updates your configuration files with any new sections that have been added. Any changes you have made yourself are preserved.

## Configuring your webserver

Xymon uses a web-based front-end. So you need to configure your webserver so that it knows where the Xymon webpages can be found, and what CGI scripts can run as part of Xymon. This usually means adding a few lines to your webserver configuration that sets up a URL which points at the ~/server/www/ directory, and which tells your webserver that the ~/cgi-bin/ directory holds CGI scripts that the webserver should run when they are requested.

If you are using the Apache webserver, you will find the necessary additions to the Apache configuration in ~/server/etc/xymon-apache.conf - it looks like this. After changing the webserver configuration, you probably need to restart the webserver.

If you configured Xymon to put the Administration CGI scripts into a separate directory (recommended for better security), you will also need to setup the password-file that controls access to this directory. Use the `htpasswd` command both to create the password file and to add or delete users:

    	# /usr/sbin/htpasswd -c /usr/lib/xymon/server/etc/xymonpasswd admin
    	New password:
    	Re-type new password:
    	Adding password for user admin
    	#

The -c option should only be used the first time, to create the password file. See the Apache documentation for details about how to use htpasswd.

## Starting Xymon

You can now login as the "xymon" user, and run the command `./server/xymon.sh start` to start Xymon. After a few seconds, it should have started and you now have the following processes running:

Quite a few, but all of them controlled by the master `xymonlaunch` process. A quick run-down of what each of them does:

- `xymond` is the network daemon that receives status updates from the clients and the network test tool. It also provides the current status of all your systems to the tool that generates the webpages.
- `xymond_channel` provides the communication between xymond and all of the helper modules that implement other server-based functions.
- `xymond_history` takes care of recording the history of status changes for each item you monitor. This is used to track what has happened with a single status over time - when it was red, when it was green, what the error reported at 2:51 AM last Friday looked like. The history file format is compatible with the format used by the Big Brother package.
- `xymond_filestore` stores files with information about the current status of the systems monitored by Xymon. There may be several of these running, but normally you will only need the one that stores information about hosts that have been disabled, which is the one you see here.
- `xymond_alert` takes care of sending out alerts when your servers begin to report a critical status.
- `xymond_rrd` updates the RRD database files with the numeric data collected from the status reports, to track e.g. how the disk utilization of a server changes over time. There are two of these processes, because the data can arrive in two different ways.

After a couple of minutes, you should have data available for the Xymon server itself. If you open a webbrowser with the Xymon URL - usually http://your.server/xymon/ - you should see something like this:

Each of the little faces indicate an item that is being monitored for this host. Here you see the default set of items that the Xymon installation sets up for a Xymon server:

- bbd is the availability of the Xymon network daemon.
- conn is a simple "ping" test of the host.
- http is the status of the HTTP-server running on the Xymon server.
- info contains information about how the host is configured in Xymon, such as what IP-address it has, what network tests are being run against this host etc.
- trends is a collection of the various RRD graphs available for this host.
- xymond is the status of the Xymon daemon, with statistics about how many monitored items are being tracked.
- xymongen is the status of the xymongen tool, which updates the webpages.
- xymonnet is the status of the xymonnet network tester that performs all of the network tests you configure in Xymon.

You can click on each of the green icons to see a more detailed status.

## Next steps

Congratulations, you now have a running Xymon server!

The next step is to configure it to monitor your servers and applications, and to set up the alerts to send you e-mail, call a pager, or send an SMS in case of trouble. For that, see the Xymon configuration guide.

## Appendix: Installing on common systems

This appendix details how to install Xymon on some of the more common types of systems.

- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 / CentOS 6
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 / CentOS 5
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 / CentOS 4
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 / CentOS 3
- Fedora Linux 17
- Debian 6 (Squeeze)
- Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)
- FreeBSD 7, 8 and 9
- OpenBSD 4, 5
- Solaris 10/x86 (using OpenCSW)
- Solaris 10/x86 (using Sun Freeware)
- Mac OSX

#### Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 / CentOS 6

RHEL6 has all of the necessary tools except fping included in the core distribution.

    groupadd xymon
    useradd -g xymon -m xymon

    yum install gcc make

    wget http://fping.org/dist/fping-3.2.tar.gz
    tar zxf fping-3.2.tar.gz
    cd fping-3.2
    ./configure
    make && make install
    cd ..

    yum install pcre-devel openssl-devel openldap-devel rrdtool-devel
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    ./configure --server
    make && make install

Copy `rpm/xymon-init.d` to `/etc/init.d/xymon` and make sure it is executable. Edit /etc/init.d/xymon and change "/usr/lib/xymon" in the DAEMON line to the directory where you installed Xymon - e.g. "/home/xymon".

Configure Apache with the Xymon definitions:
`ln -s /home/xymon/server/etc/xymon-apache.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/`

To enable automatic start of Xymon and apache:

    chkconfig httpd on
    chkconfig --add xymon
    chkconfig xymon on

#### Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 / CentOS 5

RHEL5 does not include RRDtool in the core distribution. So download it and install it in /usr/local/rrdtool. Also, fping is not included.

    groupadd xymon
    useradd -g xymon -m xymon

    yum install gcc make

    wget http://fping.org/dist/fping-3.2.tar.gz
    tar zxf fping-3.2.tar.gz
    cd fping-3.2
    ./configure
    make && make install
    cd ..

    yum install freetype-devel libpng-devel libart_lgpl-devel tcl-devel
    wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.2.30.tar.gz
    tar zxf rrdtool-1.2.30.tar.gz
    cd rrdtool-1.2.30
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/rrdtool
    make && make install
    cd ..

    yum install pcre-devel openssl-devel openldap-devel
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    ./configure --server
    make && make install

Copy `rpm/xymon-init.d` to `/etc/init.d/xymon` and make sure it is executable. Edit /etc/init.d/xymon and change "/usr/lib/xymon" in the DAEMON line to the directory where you installed Xymon - e.g. "/home/xymon".

Configure Apache with the Xymon definitions:
`ln -s /home/xymon/server/etc/xymon-apache.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/`

To enable automatic start of Xymon and apache:

    chkconfig httpd on
    chkconfig --add xymon
    chkconfig xymon on

#### Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 / CentOS 4

RHEL4 does not include RRDtool in the core distribution. So download it and install it in /usr/local/rrdtool. Also, fping is not included and some of the development files are in a non-standard location.

    groupadd xymon
    useradd -g xymon -m xymon

    yum install gcc make

    wget http://fping.org/dist/fping-3.2.tar.gz
    tar zxf fping-3.2.tar.gz
    cd fping-3.2
    ./configure
    make && make install
    cd ..

    yum install freetype-devel libpng-devel libart_lgpl-devel tcl-devel
    wget http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/pub/rrdtool-1.2.30.tar.gz
    tar zxf rrdtool-1.2.30.tar.gz
    cd rrdtool-1.2.30
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/rrdtool
    make && make install
    cd ..

    yum install pcre-devel openssl-devel openldap-devel
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    ./configure --server --pcreinclude /usr/include/pcre --sslinclude /usr/include/openssl
    make && make install

Copy `rpm/xymon-init.d` to `/etc/init.d/xymon` and make sure it is executable. Edit /etc/init.d/xymon and change "/usr/lib/xymon" in the DAEMON line to the directory where you installed Xymon - e.g. "/home/xymon".

Configure Apache with the Xymon definitions:
`ln -s /home/xymon/server/etc/xymon-apache.conf /etc/httpd/conf.d/`

To enable automatic start of Xymon and apache:

    chkconfig httpd on
    chkconfig --add xymon
    chkconfig xymon on

#### Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 / CentOS 3

Follow instructions for RHEL4.

#### Fedora 17

Follow instructions for RHEL6.

#### Debian 6 (Squeeze)

NOTE: Pre-compiled Debian packages are provided on Sourceforge, along with the source distribution file.

Debian 6 has all of the necessary tools included in the core distribution.

    apt-get install apache2 rrdtool librrd-dev libpcre3-dev libssl-dev ldap-utils libldap2-dev fping

    # Enable mod_rewrite in Apache
    cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled/
    ln -s ../mods-available/rewrite.load .
    /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
    cd

    tar zxf xymon-4.3.10.tar.gz
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    ./build/makedeb.sh 4.3.10
    mv debbuild/*.deb ../
    cd ..
    dpkg -i xymon*deb

#### Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin)

Follow instructions for Debian 6.

#### FreeBSD 7,8 and 9

Perform a standard install, make sure to install the "ports" collection. FreeBSD - in a minimal configuration - does not install any of the Xymon prerequisites, so starting from a minimal configuration you must run these commands to install the various tools and libraries needed. For those packages that have some configuration items, the defaults work fine:

    cd /usr/ports/devel/gmake; make; make install
    cd /usr/ports/devel/pcre; make; make install
    cd /usr/ports/databases/rrdtool12; make; make install
    cd /usr/ports/security/openssl; make; make install
    cd /usr/ports/net/openldap23-client; make; make install
    cd /usr/ports/net/fping; make; make  install
    cd /usr/ports/www/apache22; make; make install

Next, run the "adduser" utility and setup the "xymon" user.

After this you are ready to build and install Xymon:

    setenv PATH ${PATH}:/usr/local/bin
    setenv MAKE gmake
    cd ~
    gzip -dc xymon-4.3.10.tar.gz | tar xf -
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    ./configure	# All defaults, except group-ID for webserver is "www"
    gmake && gmake install
    chown 0:0 /home/xymon/server/bin/xymonping
    chmod u+s /home/xymon/server/bin/xymonping

    ln -s /home/xymon/server/etc/xymon-apache.cnf /usr/local/etc/apache22/Includes

To enable automatic start of Xymon when the server is booted, you must create the `/etc/rc.d/xymon` script:

    #!/bin/sh

    . /etc/rc.subr

    name="xymon"
    start_cmd="${name}_start"
    stop_cmd="${name}_stop"

    xymon_start()
    {
    	su xymon /home/xymon/server/xymon.sh start
    }

    xymon_stop()
    {
    	su xymon /home/xymon/server/xymon.sh stop
    }

    load_rc_config $name
    run_rc_command "$1"

Make sure the script is executable with
`chmod 755 /etc/rc.d/xymon`
and add the line
`xymon_enable="YES"`
to the file /etc/rc.conf

A similar script can be used to start/stop Apache automatically. Use the commands
`/usr/local/sbin/apachectl start`
and
`/usr/local/sbin/apachectl stop`
in the apache_start() and apache_stop() functions, respectively.

#### OpenBSD 4 and 5

All of the necessary packages are available from the OpenBSD "ports" collection. Note that when installing OpenBSD, you must install the "xbase" package, since this contains a library that is needed by RRDtool.

After installing the core OpenBSD system, use the ports-collection to install the necessary packages. See OpenBSD FAQ for details about using this.

    export PKG_PATH=ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/`uname -r`/packages/`uname -m`/
    pkg_add -v gmake pcre rrdtool openldap-client fping apache-httpd

Note: Check permissions on /usr/local/sbin/fping* - they must be suid root. On OpenBSD 4.6 it has been observed that this is not the case by default, so you must run
`chmod u+s /usr/local/sbin/fping*`
for them to be usable by the xymon user.

Run the `adduser` utility to setup the "xymon" user.

Configure, build and install Xymon with these commands. Configuration can use all defaults, except that the webserver group-ID is "_apache2".

    gzip -dc xymon-4.3.10.tar.gz | tar xf -
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    MAKE=gmake ./configure # All defaults except webserver group is "_apache2"
    gmake && gmake install

In /etc/apache2/httpd2.conf, add this line at the bottom:
`Include /home/xymon/server/etc/xymon-apache.conf`

To enable automatic startup, add these commands to /etc/rc.local:
`/usr/local/sbin/apachectl2 start
su xymon /home/xymon/server/xymon.sh start
`

#### Solaris 10/x86 (using OpenCSW)

All of the necessary libraries and tools for building Xymon are available in the OpenCSW archive. This appears to be a newer collection of Open Source tools, replacing the Sun Freeware archive which is now a commercial project. See below for instructions on installing Xymon using the SFW packages.

Follow the "Getting Started" instuctions on setting up your system to use the CSW archive. Briefly, this means running these commands (as root):

    pkgadd -d http://get.opencsw.org/now
    PATH=$PATH:/opt/csw/bin
    export PATH
    pkgutil -i -y cswpki
    cswpki --import
    vi /etc/opt/csw/pkgutil.conf	# Define mirror, enable use_gpg and use_md5
    pkgutil -U

After setting up the CSW archive tool, you can install the necessary tools and libraries that Xymon will use:

    pkgutil -i -y gcc4core gcc4g++ gmake
    pkgutil -i -y pcre libpcre_dev
    pkgutil -i -y rrdtool rrdtool_dev
    pkgutil -i -y openssl libssl_dev
    pkgutil -i -y openldap_client openldap_dev
    pkgutil -i -y fping

The "fping" tools must be installed suid-root so that the xymon user can run them:

    chmod u+s /opt/csw/sbin/fping*

Now, create the xymon user:

    groupadd xymon; useradd -g xymon -d /export/home/xymon -m xymon

Configure and build Xymon. All tools and libraries should be automatically detected, but it is necessary to explicitly point at the CSW OpenSSL libraries, overriding the default Solaris version of OpenSSL:

    PATH=$PATH:/usr/ccs/bin
    export PATH
    cd xymon-4.3.10
    MAKE=gmake ./configure --server --sslinclude /opt/csw/include --ssllib /opt/csw/lib
    gmake && gmake install

Install Apache and add the Xymon webserver configuration:

    pkgutil -i -y apache2
    ln -s /export/home/xymon/server/etc/xymon-apache.conf /opt/csw/apache2/etc/extra/

Add
`

      Include etc/extra/xymon-apache.conf

` to /opt/csw/apache2/etc/httpd.conf.

The CSW Apache implementation supports the Solaris SMF (svcadm) setup, but conflicts with the default Apache version that is installed with Solaris. So disable the default version, and enable the CSW version:

    /etc/init.d/apache stop
    rm /etc/rc?.d/*apache
    svcadm clear cswapache2

To enable automatic startup of Xymon when the server boots, put this into /etc/init.d/xymon:

    #!/bin/sh
    su xymon /export/home/xymon/server/xymon.sh $*
    exit $?

and then enable this via the "legacy" startup scripts by running these commands:

    ln -s /etc/init.d/xymon /etc/rc3.d/S80xymon
    ln -s /etc/init.d/xymon /etc/rc0.d/K20xymon
    ln -s /etc/init.d/xymon /etc/rc1.d/K20xymon
    ln -s /etc/init.d/xymon /etc/rcS.d/K20xymon

#### Solaris 10/x86 (using Sun Freeware)

All of the necessary libraries and tools for building Xymon are available in the Sun Freeware archive. You must install these packages to build Xymon:

- db (SMCdb47)
- freetype (SMCftype)
- gcc (SMCgcc)
- libart_lgpl (SMClibart)
- libpng (SMClibpng)
- libtool (SMClibt)
- libiconv (SMCliconv)
- libintl (SMClintl)
- make (SMCmake)
- openldap (SMColdap)
- openssl (SMCossl)
- pcre (SMCpcre)
- rrdtool (SMCrrdt)
- sasl (SMCsasl)
- zlib (SMCzlib)

After installing these, you must set PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH to pick up the new tools, then you can compile Xymon the usual way:

    groupadd xymon
    useradd -d /usr/local/xymon xymon
    PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/usr/ccs/bin; export PATH
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib; export LD_LIBRARY_PATH
    ./configure
    make
    make install

The SunFreeware libraries are installed in /usr/local/lib, which is NOT searched by default by the Solaris runtime linker. You must either set LD_LIBRARY_PATH globally to include /usr/local/lib, or you can use the "crle" utility to add /usr/local/lib to the set of directories searched by default. Typically this means running this command:

    	crle -c /var/ld/ld.config -l /usr/lib:/usr/lib/secure:/usr/local/lib

The latter method using "crle" is the recommended method, since LD_LIBRARY_PATH settings can be difficult to setup so they work for all invocations of the Xymon binaries.

#### Mac OSX 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8

Xymon is available for OSX 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8 through the macports project.

The ports can be found here:http://www.macports.org/ports.php?by=name&substr=xymon, and there's a page on how to make xymon server on a Mac.