# Installing Cricket for the Complete Beginner

This file in intended to help a total beginner get his/her first installation of Cricket up and running.

If you follow the steps below carefully, you will have a a minimal installation, following a standard layout. From here, you can explore on your own. When you need help, it will be easy for others to help you, since they will be familiar with the beginner setup.

1. Insure you have the right version of Perl. You should be using Perl 5.004 or higher. You can check by running "perl -V".
2. Insure you are on a supported platform. For your purposes as a beginner, any Unix should work. Cricket also runs on Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. This document assumes a Unix platform. Unfortunately, there is no comparable document for beginners on the Windows platform. The instructions in Installing Cricket on Win2K to Monitor WMI Counters will help with installation, then refer to this document to learn about the config tree. Do your best to translate Unix commands in this document to their Windows counterparts (i.e. Windows xcopy can replace Unix cp -r).

3. Install the modules you need. You need to install the following Perl modules for Cricket to work correctly.

       Module             From
       --------------------------------------------------------------------
       MD5                CPAN: by-authors/id/GAAS/Digest-MD5-*.tar.gz
       LWP                CPAN: by-authors/id/GAAS/libwww-perl-*.tar.gz
       DB_File            CPAN: by-authors/id/PMQS/DB_File-*.tar.gz
       Date::Parse        CPAN: by-authors/id/GBARR/TimeDate-*.tar.gz
       Time::HiRes        CPAN: by-authors/id/DEWEG/Time-HiRes-*.tar.gz

       SNMP_Session       http://www.switch.ch/misc/leinen/snmp/perl
       RRD                http://ee-staff.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/rrdtool

   Don't forget to run `make site-perl-install` when installing RRD!

   Modules marked with CPAN come from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. If you don't know where to find a CPAN site or how to install modules, take a look at the Perl FAQ here:

   ftp://ftp.cs.colorado.edu/pub/perl/CPAN/doc/FAQs/FAQ/PerlFAQ.html

   You may also be able to use CPAN.pm to quickly and easily install modules. Type "perldoc CPAN" to learn more about it. Cricket ships with a CPAN-style Bundle which should make it simple to install the modules you need. The magic command to do this is:

       % cd cricket/lib
       % perl -I. -MCPAN -e 'install Bundle::CricketPrereq'

4. Choose a user to run Cricket. Many sites create a special user to run Cricket, but that's not necessary. If you choose to run Cricket from your own account understand that there will be several directories in your home directory that Cricket needs. Learn to live with them until you know how to move them elsewhere, or use a dedicated user for Cricket so that the directories won't bug you.

   Do not run Cricket as the `root` user. Superuser privileges are not necessary to run Cricket, and granting them would very probably create a security hole on your system.

   If you use a dedicated user for Cricket make certain that mail sent to that user ends up in your mailbox. Some of Cricket's runtime errors get reported (with cron's help) via e-mail.

   In the examples, this will be the user named "cricket".

5. Extract the tarfile and run configure. Well, you seem to have already done this, since you are reading this file. Please make certain the expanded directory tree is in the home directory of the user that will be running Cricket. For example, if this was Cricket version 1.0.0, it would look like this:

       % cd ~cricket
       % gunzip -c cricket-1.0.0.tar.gz | tar xvf -

   You now need to run "sh configure" from $HOME/cricket-1.0.0:

       % cd ~cricket/cricket-1.0.0
       % sh configure

   This will fix the Perl scripts to work in your environment.

6. Make a softlink to the version you are running. To make it easier to upgrade later you'll want to make a link from a generic name to the specific name you are currently running.

   To do this:

       % cd ~cricket
       % ln -s cricket-1.0.0 cricket

   This makes it so that you can refer to things in $HOME/cricket, and still get the version 1.0.0 copies of those files. You'll then be able to swing that link over to newer versions as they become available.

   If you don't have a cricket-conf.pl file yet, copy the example file cricket-conf.pl.sample to cricket-conf.pl, and edit it. You will need to set $gCricketHome to the home directory of the user that Cricket runs as (this is used to locate the cricket-config directory, among other things). The $gInstallRoot variable should point to where the Cricket scripts are. It is recommended to point this to the symlink, so that you can just copy this file if you upgrade Cricket later. If you followed the instructions so far, $gInstallRoot will be set correctly without changing the sample, so cricket-conf.pl will contain these two lines:

       $gCricketHome = "/home/cricket";
       $gInstallRoot = "$gCricketHome/cricket";

   There usually is no need to set $gConfigRoot explicitly, so leave that line commented out.

   Usually, there is no need to touch anything else in this file.

7. Copy the sample-config tree and modify it for your site. Copy the files you intend to use from the sample-config tree from the cricket distribution to $HOME/cricket-config. You can use

       % cd ~cricket
       % cp -r cricket/sample-config cricket-config

   but the parts of the tree you won't be using immediately may cause some (otherwise harmless) warnings later on. If you don't copy the entire tree, make sure to at least include the top level Defaults file! Let's focus on two subtrees, routers and router-interfaces. If you can get these going, you'll be able to get others going too.

8. Setup the routers subtree. Go into the routers tree and look at the targets file. This is where you want to tell Cricket which router to talk to.

   Note: As far as beginners are concerned, statistics are only available from Cisco routers. If you have another kind of router, you should skip to the router-interfaces step for now. Later, when you understand the system better, you can come back and use contributed configurations from other Cricket users with hardware like yours to make your routers subtree work.

   You will be editing the file "Targets" to tell Cricket about your router. You want to change these lines:

       target  engineering-router
       target-type=Cisco-7500-Router
       short-desc  =   "Router for engineering folks"

   You should change the words "engineering-router" in the first line to the hostname of the router you want to talk to. If it has not been assigned a hostname, you need to stop and do that (perhaps by simply editing `/etc/hosts`) before configuring Cricket for the first time. Cricket can talk to things via an IP address, but configuring it that way is beyond the scope of this document.

   You should change the words "Cisco-7500-Router" to reflect the kind of router you have. You can choose from this list:

   - Cisco-2500-Router
   - Cisco-3600-Router
   - Cisco-7200-Router
   - Cisco-7500-Router

   If your router type is not on this list, choose "Cisco-2500-Router" for now. You can experiment with other types later, if you want. The only difference is the amount of information you get about ambient temperature where the router is installed.

   Comment out the other target in that file (main-router) using the Cricket comment symbol "#".

   Finally, if you are not using the default SNMP community string, "public", you need to tell Cricket what community string to use. Since a community string is something that is usually shared across many network devices, it should live at a higher place in the config tree. This is a useful feature of the config tree -- it lets you move things that apply to lots of targets to a single place (higher in the config tree) where it will be easier to maintain. To set the community string for your installation, edit the the root Defaults file, which is ~/cricket-config/Default. It has a section like this in it:

       Target  --default--
         ... other stuff ...
         snmp-community      = public

   Change "public" to your community string. Write the file and exit.

   After you make any changes to the config tree, you need to compile it. Storing it in a compiled form makes accessing it quicker and easier. Do this:

       % ~/cricket/compile

   If the compile command give you any errors, stop at this point and fix the problem. This is a good time to check to make sure you are logged in to the Cricket user account (try out the `whoami` command and see what it says). Check the FAQ for more help with errors often seen in this step.

   Now, you are ready to try out your configuration. We will run the collector by hand on just this subtree first to see if there were any errors.

       % ~/cricket/collector /routers

   You should see something like this on screen, though this example was wrapped by hand for readability:

       [25-Jan-1999 15:21:20 ] Starting collector: Cricket version 0.64
                     ( Fri May 14 14:14:28 PDT 1999 )
       [25-Jan-1999 15:21:20 ] Retrieved data for engineering-router:
                     19,19,15,22,2510380,49824724
       [25-Jan-1999 15:21:20 ] Processed 1 targets in 2 seconds.

   You can add the arguments "-logLevel debug" on to the end of the command-line to get more information to help to solve problems.

9. Set up the router-interfaces subtree. We will setup the router-interfaces subtree in much the same way that we set up the routers subtree. However, there's a tool to help us avoid the grunt work. This tool is called 'listInterfaces', and it comes in the util directory.

   listInterfaces one or two arguments. It must have a router name as the first argument, and it can take a community string as the second argument. If you do not specify the community string, it defaults to "public".

   When you run listInterfaces against a router, it will print a Cricket config to it's standard output. Thus, you can use it like this to save some work:

       % ~/cricket/util/listInterfaces engineering-router > interfaces

   You should check the automatically generated interfaces file and make certain it only lists interfaces you are interested in.

   By adding this file, you've just changed the config tree. Remember, you must compile the tree every time you edit it. Or rather, if you forget to compile the tree, the Cricket collector will do it for you, but in that case you are not likely to see any errors you might have introduced, so it's always a good idea to compile explicitly.

   Once again, run the collector by hand to make certain that it will be able to talk to your router and collect data. The command to do this is:

       % ~/cricket/collector /router-interfaces

   Once again, you should see that Cricket is successfully retrieving data for your targets.

10. Run the collector from cron. Now you need to set up cron to run the collector every five minutes for you.

    The collector is usually run from a wrapper program whose job it is to handle locking, rotating log files, and other administivia.

    The wrapper is called collect-subtrees. It reads a file from the Cricket install directory called "subtree-sets". This file holds lists of subtrees which will get processed together in a group. It also lists the places where Cricket will expect to find it's configuration and log directory. As it comes in the distribution, this file needs no changes.

    Later, you will find that this file lets you control what parts of your config tree will be collected in parallel. This is a critical feature to increase the number of devices you can poll.

    You'll need to add an entry like this to cron:

        0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * $HOME/cricket/collect-subtrees normal

    Usually, this is done by typing "crontab -e". In the crontab, it will all be on one line. It has been manually wrapped above for readability.

    If the script generates output, it will be sent to the user who owns the crontab. You should make certain you can see that mail. If you don't see the mail, you won't know what's wrong (though most of the messages you are likely to see will also show up in the $HOME/cricket-logs directory).

11. Set up the Grapher. For this part of the installation, you will need an installation of Apache running which is correctly configured to let you run CGI scripts linked into your $HOME/public_html directory via a symlink. Configuring the web server correctly has proven to be the hardest for beginning Cricket users. Here are some resources that might help you get it right:

    - The Idiot's Guide to Solving Perl CGI Problems (Don't feel bad, you are not the idiot they are talking about, OK?)
    - The CGI section of the Apache FAQ
    - The Cricket FAQ

    Please do not continue until you are certain things are configured correctly. Hint: if you are using a vanilla RedHat Linux install, you are not ready to continue until you do something about suEXEC. See the Cricket FAQ for more info.

    OK, now that you have Apache (or some other web server) correctly installed, you need to make some more links.

          % cd $HOME/public_html
          % mkdir cricket
          % cd cricket
          % ln -s $HOME/cricket/VERSION .
          % ln -s $HOME/cricket/grapher.cgi .
          % ln -s $HOME/cricket/mini-graph.cgi .
          % ln -s $HOME/cricket/lib .
          % ln -s $HOME/cricket/images .

    These links expose the minimal amount of Cricket necessary to the web server.

    Now, try going to this URL:

    http://localhost/~cricket/cricket/grapher.cgi

    If you are running under a different user, or your webserver is on a different machine from your web browser, alter the URL accordingly. Additionally, if you want to get rid of the username reference in the URL (i.e., the `~cricket` bit), using another method to start grapher.cgi, you'll have to edit grapher.cgi and uncomment the lines

        # $ENV{'HOME'} = '/path/to/cricket/home';
        # return;

    and replace `/path/to/cricket/home` with the directory you actually installed Cricket in.

    You should see the front page, including some graphics and a couple of links to more stuff. If you get a web server error page instead you MUST go check the web server error log. The answer to what went wrong will almost certainly be in there.

12. You're done! The graphs will not show any data for a while, since it takes some time to have enough history to make an interesting graph. As long as you are certain the collector is working right (now would be a very good time to check your e-mail for errors, and scan the files in $HOME/cricket-logs for errors) then you can take some time to read the other documentation, or maybe even grab a beer.

    After about an hour, you should have some mildly interesting graphs. After a day, hopefully you'll have some very interesting graphs. After three months, you'll finally have graphs that you can show to your boss to prove that you need to upgrade the office's 384 kilobit DSL to a T3. We're pulling for you, really we are. `:)`

13. The Next Step. Now that you are an expert (expert beginner, that is), you should add some more targets to your config tree, and explore the other subtrees in the sample-config tree. With those subtrees, you can monitor web server performance, switch port usage, and other interesting stuff.

    As you learn more, you'll be able to make your own subtrees to handle special kinds of data unique to your site. If you make a subtree that can support a device others are using, please submit to the Cricket contributed configurations site, which is part of Cricket's homepage at http://cricket.sourceforge.net.

Cricket version 1.0.5, released 2004-03-28.

Copyright (C) 1998-2000 Jeff Allen. Cricket is released under the GNU General Public License.