INTRODUCTION
============

Monitorix is a system monitoring tool that includes monitoring from cpu load
and temperatures to users using the system. Network device activity and
network services demand are too monitorized. It uses the Apache web server
to show the graphs.

This tool is designated to be used on Linux servers, but of course you can
use it on your laptop or on your Linux box at home.

I use Red Hat Linux and Fedora Core distributions, so this project has made it
keeping in mind these distributions. It is possible you have some problems with
other distributions. If so, contact with me.

Monitorix have a configuration file located in "/etc/monitorix/monitorix.conf",
to adapt your server to it. Every configuration option is commented in the
same file.

From time to time, I release new versions of Monitorix, to fix bugs, support
new HP servers and to make enhancements. You can always find information about
the latest version at the Monitorix Project web page:
 
        http://www.monitorix.org
 
In case of bugs please contact to Jordi Sanfeliu at jordi@monitorix.org.



REQUIREMENTS
============

This package requires some others packages to be installed that maybe your
Linux distribution does not comes with them:

'rrdtool'  - You can download it from lot of places:
	http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool/
	http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/extras/
	http://dag.wieers.com/home-made/apt/packages.php

'metamail' - To be removed in near future, but needed right now:
	You can search for it on http://www.rpmfind.net.



INSTALLATION
============

Once downloaded the RPM file, you can install it using:

rpm -ivh monitorix-n.nn.noarch.rpm (where n.nn is the current version)

This will install Monitorix on your system in this way:

/etc/cron.d/monitorix		(is the shell-script based daemon)
/etc/init.d/monitorix		(to start and stop monitorix)
/etc/monitorix/monitorix.conf	(configuration file)
/usr/sbin/monitorix.pl		(main program called by daemon)
/usr/share/doc/monitorix-n.nn	(documentation)
/var/lib/monitorix/reports/	(language reports)
/var/www/cgi-bin/monitorix.cgi	(first stage monitorix cgi)
/var/www/cgi.bin/monitorix/localhost.cgi	(second stage monitorix cgi)
/var/www/html/monitorix/	(html and images stuff of monitorix)

Once succesfully installed, you need to take some adaptations in the
configuration file.

NOTE
----
The configuration file is a Perl file where you set the value directly to the
variables that Monitorix will use during its normal operation. So you must take
special attention to not break some Perl basic syntax. I mean, every variable
need to terminate with a semicolon ";".

Please, see the "Configuration.help" file.

Once you finalize these modifications, you'll be able to start the Monitorix
shell-script based daemon with:

service monitorix start

At this point, Monitorix will start to collect the system information, and
you'll be able to see it from your favorite browser using:

http://localhost/monitorix



NOTES AFTER INSTALLATION
========================

- If you are monitoring your system and you are redirecting output to
  /var/log/syslog, you may want to add the "cron.none" directive in
  /etc/syslog.conf, in order to avoid anoying messages from cron about
  Monitorix.

- If your system is a Fedora Core 3 or 4, so you have SELinux enabled by
  default, it is possible your Monitorix graphs are not visible and you get lot
  of messages in dmesg and /var/log/messages about access denied to the RRD
  database files. I dont know enough SELinux to adapt Monitorix to it, so in
  that case my only recommendation is to disable SELinux, adding the line
  "SELINUX=disabled" in /etc/selinux/config.

- If you stops the Monitorix service and after long time you restarts it,
  you can notice that your network graphs show a very high load. This is
  because, although the cron has been stopped, the iptables chains continues
  processing the counting, and then when the cron restarts, the monitorix finds
  a value much greater than it was when stopped.

- Check that the /var/log/httpd directory have enough permissions for the
  user running the Apache server. In the newer Fedora Core versions this
  directory have the permissions restricted to only the root user.


AUTHORS
=======

Monitorix is currently maintained by Jordi Sanfeliu <jordi@fibranet.com>.



LICENSE AND COPYRIGHT
=====================

Monitorix is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
See the include file "COPYING".

Copyright (C) 2002-2005 Fibranet NSP, SL
http://www.fibranet.com

