mrtg-contrib(1) [debian man page]

MRTG-CONTRIB(1) 						       mrtg							   MRTG-CONTRIB(1)

NAME

       mrtg-contrib - Contribution Guidelines for MRTG

DESCRIPTION

       If you have written an extension to mrtg or created a bug fix, please consider contributing it to the project. As I get quite a number of
       contributions every week, here are a few guidelines which explain how to contribute so that I can use the contribution without too much
       additional work.

   Translations
       MRTG messages have been translated to a number of languages but there are still many which have not been covered yet. If you want to add
       yours, go into the mrtg-2.17.4/translate directory and follow the instructions given in the README file.

   Patches
       When you have created your modification or extension to mrtg and want to submit it to me, please crate a patch for the files which you have
       modified.  Do not send entire files unless they are new.

       To create a patch, get hold of a copy of GNU diff (Many Unix systems will have this installed already. In the NT world you might want to
       get http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/ to get all the nice GNU tools available.)	and type

	diff --unified --ignore-space-change old-file new-file > simple.patch

       or if you have modified several files do

	diff --recursive --unified --ignore-space-change old-dir/ new-dir/ >long.patch

   Documentation
       All documentation of mrtg is done with the perl POD system. If you want to learn about it, type

	perldoc perlpod

       and read the instructions. If you have bugfixes or additions to the existing documents, make sure you modify the POD files and not the html
       or txt versions.

       I take documentation very seriously. Whenever you create a new feature for mrtg which you want to get included in the official release,
       your patch must also contain modifications for the relevant pod file in the doc tree or for the documentation sections of cfgmaker and
       indexmaker.

ADDRESS

       Send your patches, translations and contributions to Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>

AUTHOR

       Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>

2.17.4								    2012-01-12							   MRTG-CONTRIB(1)

MRTG-RRD(1)							       mrtg							       MRTG-RRD(1)

NAME

       mrtg-rrd - How to use RRDtool with MRTG

SYNOPSIS

       After using MRTG for some time you may find some limitations, mostly in the areas of performance and graphing flexibility. These are
       exactly the areas addressed by RRDtool. To learn more about RRDtool check out its website on

	http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool

RRDTOOL INTEGRATION

       When using mrtg with RRDtool you are replacing rateup with the RRDtool perl module RRDs.pm. To enable RRDtool support in mrtg you have to
       add the line

	LogFormat: rrdtool

       to your mrtg config file.

       MRTG needs access to both the RRDtool perl module RRDs.pm and to the rrdtool executable.

       If these two items are not installed in locations where perl can find them on its own, then you can use the following two parameters to
       supply the appropriate directories.

       For the location of the rrdtool executable you put

	PathAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/bin/

       or

	PathAdd: c:
rdtoolin

       For the location of the perl module it would be:

	LibAdd: /usr/local/rrdtool/lib/perl/

       or

	LibAdd: c:
rdtoolinlibperl

       When you have made this modification to the configuration file, several things will happen when you run mrtg again with the new config
       file:

       1.  mrtg will take all your old ".log" files and convert them to ".rrd" format. (The ".log" files don't get touched in the process, so if
	   things don't work out they are still there.)

       2.  mrtg will use rrdtool to update its databases. These will have a new format called rrd which is totally different than the native log
	   format of the classic mrtg.

       3.  mrtg will not create any webpages of graphs anymore.  It will only query the routers for traffic information and update its rrd
	   databases.

       The advantage of whole thing is that the mrtg will become much faster. Expect the runtime to drop to 20% of the previous value. (I would
       like to get some feedback on this from folks with large installations.)

       Mind you, though, while the logging process of RRDtool is very fast, you are also gaining some time by neither creating graphs nor updating
       webpages.  The idea behind this is that it is more efficient to create graphs and webpages on demand by using a cgi script.

       At the moment there is no official script to do this, but two contributers have created such scripts:

       One4All aka 14all.cgi
	   This was the first program to take over the webpage creation and graphing task.  It has been developed by Rainer Bawidamann
	   rainer.bawidamann@web.de. You can find a copy on Rainers website: http://my14all.sourceforge.net/ The program comes with its own
	   documentation

       routers2.cgi
	   This is another CGI frontend for mrtg running with rrdtool. The main difference between this and 14all is that the web pages it creates
	   are much more stylish than the ones from mrtg, plus they support User Defined summary graphs and different levels of Authentication and
	   Authorisation. This has been written by Steve Shipway (steve@steveshipway.org). You obtain a copy, and find a forum and demonstration
	   system at http://www.steveshipway.org/software/ The program comes with its own installation instructions and install script.

       mrtg-rrd
	   The mrtg-rrd script is a CGI/FastCGI application by Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak for displaying MRTG graphs from data in the RRDtool format. It
	   is an intended replacement for the 14all.cgi script. It can make your monitoring system faster because MRTG does not have to generate
	   all the PNG files with graphs every 5 minutes or so. Instead of this the graphs are generated on-demand when the user wants to see
	   them. http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/mrtg-rrd/

FUTURE

       Just as a side note: MRTG-3 will be based entirely on rrdtool technology.  But don't wait for it ... get going now!

AUTHOR

       Tobias Oetiker <tobi@oetiker.ch>

2.17.4								    2012-01-12							       MRTG-RRD(1)