Introduction
This is a project suggested by Bebo White to build a PingER monitoring host based on an inexpensive hardware called Raspberry Pi (see more about Raspberry Pi) using a linux distribution as OS (see more about Raspbian). If successful one could consider using these in production reducing the costs, power drain (they draw about 2W of 5V DC power compared to typically over 100W for a deskside computer or 20W for a laptop) and space (credit card size) assisting monitoring sites to be able to procure and support such monitoring hosts. This could be very valuable for sites in developing countries where cost, power utilization and to a lesser extent space may be crucial.
Raspberry Pi Model and Specifications
The Raspberry belongs to Bebo White and it is the version 1 of Raspberry Pi, model B. The cost is about $25/each + costs of the SD card. The Raspberry purchased each has 512MB RAM, on a 700Mhz ARM CPU and a 32GB SD Card was used. They have 2 USB and 1 100Mb/s Ethernet interfaces and 1 HDMI port. Keep in mind that is necessary to have a keyboard, a mouse and a HDMI monitor to do the process, but once working they are not necessary anymore.
Operating System
The installed system is called Raspbian a Debian Linux variant. The OS had Perl, Make, dig, ping and mail installed. We accessed it through the graphic interface of Raspbian. We just had to install: Apache and XML::Simple.
Installation of PingER2
Following the instructions in PingER End-to-end Reporting version 2. After installing the PingER2 monitoring code, we installed the ping_data gathering agent, and the traceroute server following the instructions. Lastly we had to change the hostname in Raspbian.
sudo nano /etc/hosts
sudo nano /etc/hostname
sudo /etc/init.d/hostname.sh
Notice that the hostname here must include the domain. So, our hostname was pinger.raspberry.slac.stanford.edu. In the hosts file is not necessary to write the domain name.
We temporarily entered the machines as monitors in the PingER meta data base of hosts and successfully gathered the data using the standard overnight cronjob.