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

Blair Zajac blair at orcaware.com
Mon Oct 8 09:31:23 PDT 2001


First, I would download orca 0.27b2, as it is the most stable Orca yet.

Answers below.

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.  Each of the host(s) whose
> files would get processed would have the resulting
> processed files placed in a seperate subdir on a local
> disk on the Orca server.  If I understood correctly,
> the RRD files should be on a local disk and the html
> files could be on either a local or network/remote
> filesystem as this is better for performance on the
> server the Orca process is running on.


That's right.  The only misunderstanding is that orcallator.se does not
generate the RRD files, that is what Orca does.


> 
> 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.


Different people do pushing differently.  Some people don't do pushing at
all and have the Orca server NFS export a filesystem that is mounted by all
the systems that run orcallator.se.  Those systems write to the NFS mounted
filesystem.

Other people don't trust NFS for security reasons and use rsync or scp, etc
to copy the files as you mention.


> 
>       I would like to install and setup Orca with the
> following systems in mind:
> 
> 2 E450 Servers which are Orcale server with Gigbit
> Ethernet.
> 1 E4000 Server.
> 2 Ultra 5 Servers.
> 2 Ultra 2 servers.
> 
>       All of the above systems are a mixture of Solaris
> 2.6 and 8 Operating Environments.
> 
>       If what I said above is the appropriate idea behind
> Orca, I would like to use an Ultra 1
> workstation/server as the server running Orca. I have
> a Linux Web server that I would like to use to serve
> the resulting web pages that Orca would generate.
> Questions.
> 
> 1. Is an Ultra 1 sufficent to handle the processing
> for the above mentioned systems?  I have access to
> several Ultra 1 systems and would like to make use of
> them.


Yes, this will be fine.


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


Rusty gave statistics for his RRD file set.  The output HTML directory for the
example pages at

	http://www.orcaware.com/orca/orca-example/

show statistics for 10 systems and 34844 Kbytes of space.

Regards,
Blair


> 
>       Any suggestions, comments would be greatly
> appreciated.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Wayne
> E-mail: leewa2000 at yahoo.com
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> "Art is a skill. The skill is what frees your talent."
> --Duke Ellington
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --
> "I am not a pessimist.  To perceive evil where it
> exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism."  --
> Roberto Rossellini



More information about the Orca-users mailing list