Voyage Linux 0.6.5 on Alix 2d3 board - a few questions

Hi all,

I've recently installed Voyage Linux on an Alix 2d3 board. Its main purpose is to run Cacti to monitor my home network.

I have some Linux experience but would still call myself a beginner. I'd appreciate some beginner friendly answers .. ;-)

Here's the questions I have for now:

- The Alix 2d3 does not have a battery for the real time clock. I'd like to sync the time via NTP. I have installed ntpd and set my time zone and changed the NTP servers in my /etc/ntp.conf to 0.uk.pool.ntp.org though 3.uk.pool.ntp.org. But the clock is still off. At the moment it's running about 40 minutes fast. How do I configure it so that it syncs time on start-up and periodically thereafter?

- How do I stop and start services? I'm looking for something similar to /etc/services <service_name> stop|start|status on Red Hat. I've googled my heart out for what seems like decades to no avail.

- I've installed net-snmp and lm-sensors. I can read the mainboard and CPU temperatures with the sensors command. I would like to graph the temperatures in Cacti. Is there a way to include the sensors as an SNMP source so that I can add the graph in Cacti? Alternatively, does anyone know about a RRDtool script do get the sensor data into Cacti? Again. I've googled that to no avail...

I'm sure I'll have more questions soon but that should be enough for now.. ;-)

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Chris

I can help with time synchronization if you are using ntpd to synchronize the time.

Check to be sure that you have your selected time servers in /etc/ntp.conf

Next run

ntpupdate 0.uk.pool.ntp.org

to synchronize your clock with a time servers. If this server happens to be down, change to one of the others.

The ntpupdate program will return a line similar to this one

24 Mar 18:16:43 ntpdate[10255]: adjust time server 200.100.20.10 offset -0.000267 sec

If the offset is > 1 second (The digit(s) before the decimal point in the offset is > 0) then run ntpupdate again using the same time server.

Count the number of times you need to run ntpupdate to get an offset less than 1.

In your startup routines add a script that runs ntpupdate as follows

#!/bin/bash
# Initial time sync of Linux without an on-board clock

# Repeat ntpupdate and sleep commands as necessary to match the number of updates you needed to do to get accurate time
# by changing counter= to the number of times you ran ntpupdate

counter=4

sync1=$counter
sync2=$counter

while [ $sync1 -gt 0 ]; do
   ntpupdate 0.uk.pool.ntp.org
   sleep 1
done
# backup sync in case primary time server is down
# repeat these the same number of times as the ones above

while [ $sync1 -gt 0 ]; do
   ntpupdate 1.uk.pool.ntp.org
   sleep 1
done

# a few seconds later we now have an accurate software clock running

Be sure this runs after your network initializes and before ntpd (the time sync deamon) starts.

I'm not sure about Voyage Linux, but you can use killall to shutdown services.

killall ntpd # safely kills all instances of ntpd running on the server
killall -9 ntpd # kills all instances of ntpd by sending signal 9 (this usually stops ones that automatically restart)

Looking on the Voyager site, it appears that there are no commands for service start/restart/stop yet, but they will be included in a future release. Meanwhile I hope this helps. I understand that Voyager was intended as an embedded Linux for devices, and starting/stopping services was probably not a priority for an embedded linux.

Sorry, I can't help with SNMP or Cacti. Both are outside my experience.

Thanks for that Roger.
I did come across ntpupdate while googling. It turned out that this doesn't seem to exist on my installation.

alix:~# ntpupdate
-bash: ntpupdate: command not found
alix:~#

However, the time/date issue seems to have fixed itself. Looks like I should just have been more patient waiting for the time to be updated. I'll keep an eye on it and will get back to your suggestion if the time goes wrong again. Any idea about the missing ntpupdate?


Regarding starting/stopping services, you suggest to just kill the service and then start it again with its specific command in /etc/init.d? Isn't there some sort of package that I could install?


Anyone any ideas about SNMP and Cacti?