Install symon on CentOS

Hi guys i am trying to install symon or symux (which one works i ll be fine with).

The problem is that I cant seem to install it. I get an error that says

*** missing seperator. Stop

i have tried using make and make install (same error)
i also tried using pmake and pmake install but it says pmake command not found

I am new to linux so i dont know if i am doing something wrong. I am not also sure if i have to build the install since it is not an rpm. i have just downloaded and untared from h**p://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon/download.html


Please any idea how to successfully install symon on CentOS

I would check to see if symon is included in the Yum (package manager) repositories that CentOS provides first as this should make everything a lot easier. It will install it if it exists as well as d/l any necessary repositories with it. Type yum at a shell to get a list of commands you can run but, you will probably want do do yum search symon first. You can also check this site out if you need more help. http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/yum/

Hope this helps

Hi Godsson

I don't have a Centos install nor have I tried this package, but there are a few useful things that can be said. Firstly there doesn't appear to be any binary rpm for Centos or any other distro, so the tar file is all that is available, and it will need compilation. In the INSTALL instructions (which are quite cryptic) it looks like you need rrdtool. You can check if Centos has it with "yum list available | grep rrdtool" and if it shows up, install with "yum install rrdtool". Secondly they state the use of pmake for Linux. According to the pmake website some makefiles can have additional directives specific to pmake, so it is quite on the cards that this error is arising from that source. I found a reference to pmake for Centos so you may have some luck with "yum list available | grep pmake". Otherwise look for a Centos rpm, or as a last resort, source code that can be compiled (at least that won't require the use of pmake!). There may yet be other dependencies needed to complete the compilation, such as kernel headers, so don't despair yet. This is the normal lot of Linux users when they stray from the narrow (Ubuntu) path.

cheers, Ken

tnx for ur responses.

I tried installing rrdtool on a CentOS4.7 with the #./configure and realized i needed pango1.17 or later installed (see pic rrdtool). doing #yum info pango bring out a version 1.6 which is old, so I also have to install manually.

I have downloaded and tried installing pango and I get an error message (pic pango)

now im stuck. I assumed the packages were old because it is CeontOS4.7 so i tried using CentOS5. (Note i have also used the yum update to make sure i am using latest packages)

For CentOS5 the #./configure works fine but when i do the #make I get the error message on the pic attached (rrd make error)


Also Kenarkies pmake was available for centos4 tru yum but is not available for centos5. I also tried the #yum list available | grep but none of these packages are seem to be available.

So i am still stuck. any ideas

Hi Godsson

Originally Posted by Godsson I tried installing rrdtool on a CentOS4.7 with the #./configure and realized i needed pango1.17 or later installed (see pic rrdtool). doing #yum info pango bring out a version 1.6 which is old, so I also have to install manually. I have downloaded and tried installing pango and I get an error message (pic pango) now im stuck. I assumed the packages were old because it is CeontOS4.7 so i tried using CentOS5. (Note i have also used the yum update to make sure i am using latest packages) For CentOS5 the #./configure works fine but when i do the #make I get the error message on the pic attached (rrd make error)

OK the move to Centos 5 is a good one. Note that Centos 5 follows RHEL5 (the commercial version). Both of these have kernels that date back a few years. People use them to ensure that they have very stable, well tested systems. I tend to use Fedora which is the bleeding edge RH distro, but it can have some bugs still sitting around.

Always attempt to get a package from the repositories using yum as it will resolve and install all missing dependent packages (try yum, then search for an rpm, then last of all compile from source in that order to minimize frustration levels). If rrdtool is not available in the repository, then try the RHEL5 version from Dag Wieers (http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rrdtool/) or wherever it turns up in Google. Look for something like rrdtool-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm). Of course if you still need some extra packages such as pango then get them using yum. Fedora 10 has rrdtool 1.3.8 which is a bit further advanced that those on Dag Wieers site. When downloaded you would install it with

rpm -i rrdtool-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

and it will tell you if it needs any other packages.

Originally Posted by Godsson Also Kenarkies pmake was available for centos4 tru yum but is not available for centos5. I also tried the #yum list available | grep but none of these packages are seem to be available.

I'm almost certain you need pmake, you could grab an rpm for the earlier Centos and try it, otherwise it will need compilation (oh joy).

On a more fundamental note, what is the purpose for using symon? It seems to be a rather little known tool and was originally written for BSD rather than Linux, hence the need for pmake rather than make. It does have some features that tools like Monitorix don't have, but the latter is so much simpler to setup and use, and has a natty web interface. I use it successfully to monitor system activities on remote servers.

Anyway keep persevering and we'll do what we can to help.

cheers, Ken

Hi Kenarkies, tnx 4 d reply

Originally Posted by Kenarkies On a more fundamental note, what is the purpose for using symon? It seems to be a rather little known tool and was originally written for BSD rather than Linux, hence the need for pmake rather than make. It does have some features that tools like Monitorix don't have, but the latter is so much simpler to setup and use, and has a natty web interface. I use it successfully to monitor system activities on remote servers. Anyway keep persevering and we'll do what we can to help. cheers, Ken

Okay i was actually working with openbsd (which i am also new to) and I am trying to monitor bandwidth on an openbsd vpn node. the move to centos was because i was finding it hard to get apache, php, rrdtools etc (dependencies as usual) installed on openbsd and i felt it will be easier with linux. So the linux box is basically going to be collecting the data from the openbsd node. monitorix does not seem work with openbsd, i can see legacy unix, will bsd pass for that?

I successfully installed rrdtool & pmake on the centos but now i am trying to install symon and I have issues. its shows errors (pmake error pic) when i run pmake.


ps: I induced the make file pics in case they might be useful
/***/symon/Makefile >> (makefile)
/***/symon/Makefile.inc >> (make file.inc)
/***/symon/platform?linux/Makefile.inc >> (makefile.inc2)

the Pmake error pic

Originally Posted by Godsson monitorix does not seem work with openbsd, i can see legacy unix, will bsd pass for that?

Sorry BSD is totally unknown to me.

Originally Posted by Godsson I successfully installed rrdtool & pmake on the centos but now i am trying to install symon and I have issues. its shows errors (pmake error pic) when i run pmake.

OK I managed to get it to work on Fedora 10, where rrdtool is available. A pmake file I dug out for an early fedora (pmake-1.45-14) was buggy and couldn't find its own config files, but a Centos one (pmake-1.45-16) through http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/pmake.html worked fine. Installed rrdtool and rrdtool-devel and symon and compile went through without a hitch.

I setup a barebones Centos 5.2 and found neither pmake nor rrdtool was present in the default repositories. This is what I did to get success:

From the linux.maruhn.com site I pulled down pmake again and installed it. Then from Dag Wieers (http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/rrdtool/) I got

perl-rrdtool-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rrdtool-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rrdtool-devel-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

I had to get another package installed because my Centos was absolute minimal

yum install libart_lgpl

Then:

rpm -ivh perl-rrdtool-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm rrdtool-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm rrdtool-devel-1.2.23-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

all in one line to ensure all interdependencies are resolved. I probably could have used yum instead of "rpm -ivh" which would have grabbed the libart dependency automatically.

wget http://www.xs4all.nl/~wpd/symon/philes/symon-2.79.tar.gz
tar -zxf symon-2.79.tar.gz
cd symon
pmake

===> lib
cc -O -Wall -I../platform/Linux -I. -o error.o -c error.c
cc -O -Wall -I../platform/Linux -I. -o lex.o -c lex.c
cc -O -Wall -I../platform/Linux -I. -o xmalloc.o -c xmalloc.c
cc -O -Wall -I../platform/Linux -I. -o net.o -c net.c
cc -O -Wall -I../platform/Linux -I. -o data.o -c data.c
building standard symon library
ranlib libsymon.a
===> symon
Generating conf.h on Linux
cc -O -Wall -I../lib -I../platform/Linux -I. -o symon.o -c symon.c
cc -O -Wall -I../lib -I../platform/Linux -I. -o readconf.o -c readconf.c
cc -O -Wall -I../lib -I../platform/Linux -I. -o symonnet.o -c symonnet.c
... (more of the same)
strip symon
nroff -mandoc symon.8 > symon.cat8 || (rm -f symon.cat8; false)
===> symux
Generating conf.h on Linux
... (more compilations)
===> client
pod2man SymuxClient.pm > SymuxClient.cat3p.tmp || (rm -f SymuxClient.cat3p; false)
nroff -mandoc SymuxClient.cat3p.tmp > SymuxClient.cat3p || (rm -f SymuxClient.cat3p; false)
rm -f SymuxClient.cat3p.tmp

bingo! I stopped at that point. I'll keep the Centos install for a while in case you still have trouble. Hope it works!

Ken

Originally Posted by Kenarkies Sorry BSD is totally unknown to me. A pmake file I dug out for an early fedora (pmake-1.45-14) was buggy and couldn't find its own config files, but a Centos one (pmake-1.45-16) through http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/pmake.html worked fine. Ken

Tanx, u d man. i guess it was the pmake (Version : 1.45/Release : 10)
that was the problem. Upgraded to (Version : 1.45/Release : 16) and it worked fine

hi, i realized that symon need certain rights on certain files as the documentation says. please how so i set the following permissions on the specified files

Privileges
==========
symon needs to interface with your kernel. Depending on your host system this leads to different privilege requirements:

Linux: - r on /proc/net/dev: if
- r on /proc/stat: cpu, cpuiow
- r on /proc/meminfo: mem


when i run symon in debuging mode i get the following errors

[root@localhost net]# /usr/local/bin/symon -d
symon version 2.79
program id=9651
debug: symon packet size=157
sending packets to udp 10.2.5.82 2100
started module if(eth0)
started module mem()
warning: cannot access /proc/stat: No such file or directory
started module cpu(0)
warning: cannot access /proc/stat: No such file or directory
warning: cannot access /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory
warning: could not read if statistics from /proc/meminfo: Bad file descriptor
warning: cannot access /proc/net/dev: No such file or directory
warning: could not find Active in /proc/meminfo
warning: could not find MemTotal in /proc/meminfo
warning: could not find MemFree in /proc/meminfo
warning: could not find SwapFree in /proc/meminfo
warning: could not find SwapTotal in /proc/meminfo

Originally Posted by Godsson when i run symon in debuging mode i get the following errors [root@localhost net]# /usr/local/bin/symon -d symon version 2.79 ... started module if(eth0) started module mem() warning: cannot access /proc/stat: No such file or directory started module cpu(0) warning: cannot access /proc/stat: No such file or directory warning: cannot access /proc/meminfo: No such file or directory warning: could not read if statistics from /proc/meminfo: Bad file descriptor warning: cannot access /proc/net/dev: No such file or directory warning: could not find Active in /proc/meminfo warning: could not find MemTotal in /proc/meminfo warning: could not find MemFree in /proc/meminfo warning: could not find SwapFree in /proc/meminfo warning: could not find SwapTotal in /proc/meminfo

That certainly is most bizarre. The obvious check is to see if those files are present, however almost certainly they are. /proc is not a normal disk-based filesystem but is created on startup with various bits of information about the hardware etc. The files all exist in Fedora 10 and Centos 5.3 and all have only the read attributes set.

Using lsof shows that these files are not opened by any other process.

All I can do is to verify that this error does occur and that the line

if ((fd = open("/proc/meminfo", O_RDONLY)) < 0) {
warning("cannot access /proc/meminfo: %.200s", strerror(errno));

in platform/Linux/sm_mem.c does indeed return fd=-1 and errno indicates "file not found".

I would like to understand what is happening here so I may follow it up in a separate thread, unless some kind guru can enlighten us.

Ken

On an inspiration I looked up the open() function in C. It and the associated functions close() and read() are not part of the standard C definition and their implementation varies between compilers. Here it looks like they are not working properly. The functions that are standard are fopen(), fclose() and fread(). Substituting them in all the source files in platform/Linux got rid of the error, but so far I haven't got them quite right. The program crashes. This is getting a bit deep as I'm not a C programmer but I'll look at it over the next day or so.

Are there any C programmers out there?

Ken

ok i don't quite get where the "c" comes in but because i had assumed it was a permission problem and unfortunalely i am not also good with "c"

however i assumed giving all (owner, group, and everyone) wrx permission would help. (i.e chmod 777) i have done this and it doesn't seem to be much different, but i might have left something out or done this incorrectly, i just wanted to know what you felt about this

Originally Posted by Godsson ok i don't quite get where the "c" comes in but because i had assumed it was a permission problem and unfortunalely i am not also good with "c" however i assumed giving all (owner, group, and everyone) wrx permission would help. (i.e chmod 777) i have done this and it doesn't seem to be much different, but i might have left something out or done this incorrectly, i just wanted to know what you felt about this

No that won't help because the permissions are OK as they are. The offending section in the code is quite small and simple, basically a small block in each program segment in platform/Linux to open one of the information files in /proc, read it all in to a buffer, and close the file. The buffer contents are then processed. I've tried changing the program to use the ANSI standard functions fopen etc, but the problem persists. The explanation must be somewhere. I may have to do what I threatened and post a new topic for this particular problem.

Ken

Hi Godsson

It looks like the program is using chroot to limit the damage that could be done if the program crashed somehow. However chroot isolates the program from access to the directories in /proc, which is why they cannot be found.

I removed line 251:

drop_privileges(flag_unsecure);

from symon/symon.c; this function call moves the program to a chroot jail. But this is not a permanent fix. Chroot in Linux seems to be different to chroot in FreeBSD, which latter appears to reproduce the /proc directories inside the jail.

This got over the "file not found" problem, but the program threw up a segmentation fault.

So my feeling is that a bit of programming effort would be needed to fix all this; the port over to Linux by the author does not seem to have worked.

Do you still want to pursue it or look for an alternative? I'm not really competent to tackle this in the short term, but if you are still keen and feel that it offers something unique, I can persevere. Perhaps look at Monitorix, Linux Monitor and others before you make any decisions.

Ken