Introduction
This is a project suggested by Marco Zennaro of ICTP Trieste to build a PingER monitoring host based on an inexpensive embedded Linux platform. If successful one could consider using these in production reducing the costs (maybe something on power requirements compared to a regular deskside or rack mount server) for monitoring sites to procure and support such monitoring hosts.
Embedded Linux Processor
The initial two machines were purchased from PCEngines located in Switzerland. The cost is about $110/machine. The machines purchased each have 256MB RAM, on a 500MHZ AMD Geode CPU, with 128KB L2 cache, and a 4GB Flash memory. They have 2 USB and 2 Ethernet interfaces. There is a picture here of one of the machines, and there is more information at the PCEngines site.
The installed system is called Voyage Linux. The machines had perl and Apache installed. We also had to install: make, dig, mail, and XML::Simple.
Installation of PingER2
Following the instructions in PingER End-to-end Reporting version 2, we installed PingER2 under the /root/pinger-2.0.2 directory. There is an example of the installation here.
Something here from Marco about handling crontab, maybe some rationale why it is different. Also something on /etc/log/apache and modifying httpd.conf to put log files there. What about remountpw.
After installing the PingER2 monitoring code, we installed the ping_data gathering agent, and the traceroute server following the instructions.
Deployment
Experiences
Marco any concerns about flash memory and repeated accesses, lifetime etc.?