[Orca-users] Re: Setup/Configuration Questions.

[Rusty Carruth]

leewa2000 at yahoo.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>  
>  	I just downloaded version 0.26 of Orca.  I have a
> few questions about setting up and configuring Orca. 
> I was a little unsure if I understood the
> documentation correctly.  I just need a little
> clarification.
>  
> 1. My understanding as to how one sets up Orca would
> be that one runs the "orca" process on a single system
> (ie. server).  The orca process processes all of the
> RRD files created by other hosts and generates the
> html files and graphs.

Actually, I understood that orca created the rrd files itself
if needed, and THOSE files should be local to orca, but
the text files can be nfs-mounted (and I SURE Hope I'm right,
as that's how *I* have it set up - in fact, the NFS mount
is across a T1 line, so I'm really hosed if I'm wrong ;-)

I have no comments or questions on the other part of question
1, so I'll leave that to the experts.

>  ...
> 2. Each system one wishes to gather stats on would
> simply be setup to run the "orcallator.se" script that
> comes with the SEToolKit 3.2 that I think is also
> called "Virtual Adrian".  Each system would then
> "push" the resulting files generated by the
> "orcallator.se" to the Orca server as mentioned in
> point 1.  The files would be "pushed" periodically
> possibly by use of a crontab entry on each system
> running ftp, rcp, scp, etc.

Um, not needed.  just have the text files accessible to the
orca system, and point it (orca) at them.  Again, that's what
I'm doing, and except for getting my mouth held right w.r.t.
the number of columns in the file its working great (I'm 
adding a column of  output - normal folks won't have this 
problem!).

> ...
>  
> 1. Is an Ultra 1 sufficent to handle the processing
> for the above mentioned systems?  

Is anything else going on on the ultra 1?  I'm running orca
on my u5, and barely notice when it runs.  Your worst case is
startup, when it REALLY uses cpu time - but then, if you have
enough memory orca simply gets niced down and you never notice it.

(In my experience, the biggest problem folks have on Suns is
either too little memory or underpowered/overloaded networks.)

> 2. Approximately how much local diskspace would one
> think I would need to handle the data from the above
> mentioned systems?

Note that orcallator will compress the log files for you (which
may cause a problem with orca - comments from experts?), so that
helps a bit with space.

Here's the stats from my setup:

# machines watched:	27
# days logged:		 4
disk usage, log files: 26999 (as reported by du -ks (note - uncompressed logs))
approx compression:	90%   (when log files are compressed by gzip

Since my plots are not working, I cannot give you a size there.... (again,
not orca's (nor orcallator.se's) fault ;-)

Hope this helps a little...

rc


Rusty E. Carruth       Email:     rcarruth at Tempe.tt.slb.com or rcarruth at slb.com
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