Smokeping+lighttpd+TCPPing on Debian/Ubuntu

Some notes on getting Smokeping to work on Debian/Ubuntu using the lighttpd web server, and the TCPPing check.

Install the lighttpd package first, as then the subsequent smokeping package installation will notice that it doesn’t require the Apache web server. However, Smokeping doesn’t auto-configure for lighttpd so a couple of commands are necessary:

# lighttpd-enable-mod cgi
# /etc/init.d/lighttpd force-reload
# ln -s /usr/share/smokeping/www /var/www/smokeping

Visiting your web server’s base url should show a lighttpd help page, and visiting the /cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi path should show the Smokeping home page with logo images working.

Install the TCPPing script by downloading from http://www.vdberg.org/~richard/tcpping and saving to somewhere like /usr/local/bin/tcpping (setting execute bit, also). Obviously, use this path in your Smokeping Probe configuration:

+ TCPPing

binary = /usr/local/bin/tcpping
forks = 10
offset = random
# can be overridden in Targets
pings = 5
port = 21

For the TCPPing check, make sure you have the standalone tcptraceroute package installed. You might find an existing /usr/sbin/tcptraceroute command is available, but this is from the traceroute package and won’t work with the TCPPing script.