WHMExt Review (Web Host Manager Extension) Published: Sep 05, 2005

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Easy install guide to using MRTG on Ensim 3.7 for RHEL & Fedora. An excellent tool for monitoring your servers total bandwidth usage, cpu, apache hits/sec and much more.

What is the Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG)?

The Multi Router Traffic Grapher (MRTG) is a tool to monitor the traffic load on network-links. MRTG generates HTML pages containing graphical images which provide a LIVE visual representation of this traffic. Check http://www.ee.ethz.ch/stats/mrtg/ for an example. MRTG is based on Perl and C and works under UNIX and Windows NT.

Cheetaweb has made the following packages available for MRTG integration on Ensim 3.7 servers.

Downloadables:

Fedora Core 1
http://www.download.cheetaweb.com/fedora/1/mrtg/mrtg-2.10.5-1.0.rhfc1.ct.i386.rpm

RH Enterprise Linux 3
http://www.download.cheetaweb.com/redhat/EL3/mrtg/mrtg-2.10.5-1.0.rhel3.ct.i386.rpm

Installing MRTG

Step 1. Login to your server through SSH and su - to the root user.

Step 2. Download it to your server
wget filename - replace this with whichever version of Linux link you are running above.

Step 3. Install the RPM
rpm -Uvh mrtg-2.10.5*.rpm

Running the MRTG application

Step 1. Restart the webserver - usually
/etc/init.d/httpd restart

Step 2. You will need to start mrtg via
/etc/init.d/mrtg start

Step 3. To set MRTG to autostart run: 
chkconfig mrtg on

Suggestions

By default the config only allows access from localhost - i.e. you can links http://localhost/mrtg/ from the server itself and it will work.

If you want to change this, you edit the /etc/httpd/conf.d/mrtg file - i.e.
nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/mrtg

and change the Allow line to include your one IP address; for example, if you want it to allow anyone across the world to access it (note that has information disclosure implications), you can set it to:

Deny from none
Allow from all

Common Errors

Errors on starting the MRTG monitor, what do I do?
Restart MRTG 3 times - trust me this will fix it!
/etc/init.d/mrtg restart - wait a few minutes before repeating each one.

I'm getting locales settings errors?
Edit the file: pico /etc/sysconfig/i18n

#LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANG="C /usr/bin/mrtg"

should be

LANG="en_US"

Save the changes Ctrl + X then Y