[cricket-users] Cricket installation on Centos 5 and plesk 9.1

[Vardan Antonyan]

Dear List members,

I was using Cricket in several companies over the years and was very happy as well as my boss. Recently we migrated into new server and I was assigned to duplicate all of older server services and one of them was transferring our cricket network monitoring software.
It took me agonizing three days to make the cricket work and I found that documentation is outdated and there is changes in the software world that are not reflected in installation.
Changes that i did not like was:
1. RRD tool homepage http://oss.oetiker.ch/ does not mention cricket in list of software yet MRTG and cacti are listed.
2. cpan does not have SNMP_Session and RDD packages anymore
3. Last time anyone submitted new script configuration was in 2003
4. Cricket is not available in yum repositories and generally for Fedora core and Redhat distributions

I love cricket and I am see all above as signs of early demise and would like to help.
Over the years I configured several devices that is not listed in your config tree and those are cisco and quintum VOIP devices I like to contribute but don't know where and to whom.
Lets bring cricket back and se it florish.
I wrote down in few words what I did (eventually) to be able installing cricket on Centos5 with plesk control panel 9.1 (latest and greatest as of April 2009).
Here is the list:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. Get Cricket and unzip it
2. mv cricket-1.05 /usr/local/cricket
3. cd /usr/local/cricket
4. cp cricket-conf.pl.sample cricket-conf.pl
5. vi cricket-conf.pl

$gCricketHome = "/usr/local/";
$gInstallRoot = "$gCricketHome/cricket";
$gConfigRoot = "/$gInstallRoot/cricket-config";

6. perl cricket-conf.pl
7. mkdir /usr/local/cricket/cricket-config/
8. cd /usr/local/
9. chcon -h system_u:object_r:httpd_sys_content_t cricket -R
10. chow webadmin.psacln cricket -R
11. use cpan to install required packages:
cpan >install MD5
cpan >install LWP
cpan >install DB_File
cpan >Date::Parse
cpan >Time::HiRes

11. Get stable relese rrdtool from http://oss.oetiker.ch/
unzip
./configure
At this time it will complain about lots of things missing especially cairo
Use yum to install all required packages and dont forget that when it complaints can not find libxml the rrd tool author means libxml-devel.
when all of requirements met you can finally do:
make
make install

12. Create password protected directory in your webserver path called cricket
in our case it is: /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/cricket
13. Painful step to make CGI scripts executible in this directory
After much trial and error we end up adding following in our httpd.incude file:

<Directory "/var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/cricket">
Options +ExecCGI +FollowSymLinks
<Files ~ (\.cgi$)>
SetHandler cgi-script
</Files>
</Directory>

And make sure your Apache has "AddHandler cgi-script .cgi" in its configuration

14. Make links in your cricket web directory:
14.1. Inforce a defult group to cricket directory
chmod 2755 /var/www/vhosts/domain.com/httpdocs/cricket
14.2. Create links:
sudo -u webadmin ln -s /usr/local/cricket/grapher.cgi .
sudo -u webadmin ln -s /usr/local/cricket/images/ .
sudo -u webadmin ln -s /usr/local/cricket/lib/ .
sudo -u webadmin ln -s /usr/local/cricket/mini-graph.cgi .

15. get SNMP_Session-1.12.tar.gz unzip, compile and install it

16. get genRtrConfig and build your own tree of SNMP devices

This isntallation was done on Centos-5 with plesk control panel 9.1 and used:
SNMP_Session-1.12.tar.gz
rrdtool-1.3.7.tar.gz