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Setting up MRTG on Debian

Here's what I did to set up MRTG on a debian box:

  • Installed snmpd (MRTG uses snmpd for network monitoring.

  • Changed the snmpd config file to uncomment the "readonly" entry and comment out the "paranoid" entry. The new configuration looks like this:

        #       sec.name  source          community
        #com2sec paranoid  default         public
        com2sec readonly  default         public
        #com2sec readwrite default         private
    

    Restarted snmpd after this:

        # /etc/init.d/snmpd restart
    
  • Changed my webserver config files so that /var/www/mrtg is aliased to an appropriate subdirectory (you don't need to do this if /var/www is already your DocumentRoot, this is the debian default).

  • Added the following info to my /etc/mrtg.cfg file:

        RunAsDaemon: no
        EnableIPv6: no
        Options[_]: bits,growright
    

    I prefer to follow Debian's convention of running mrtg every five minutes from a cron job as opposed to running it as a daemon. If you'd rather run mrtg as a daemon, just set RunAsDaemon to "yes" - the cron job will then just become a keepalive job.

  • Ran " cfgmaker public@127.0.0.1 >> /etc/mrtg.cfg" to create the monitoring for the network interfaces on localhost.

  • Ran " indexmaker /etc/mrtg.cfg > /var/www/mrtg/index.html" to regenerate the index page (you need to do this when making configuration changes that add stuff to mrtg).

And now I have some spiffy bandwidth graphs. Thanks MRTG guys!