PLUTO: Installation

Pluto Installation

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Basic installation is fairly simple. After unpacking PLUTO you have to configure the following five variables in the program itself. All of them are pretty obvious:


$SENDMAIL = "|/usr/lib/sendmail -t";    # How to invoke sendmail directly
$PATH_TO_PLUTO = "/path/to/pluto";      # directory containing executable
$PLUTO_GURU = 'you@bar.edu';            # Email address of local PLUTO administr
ator
@reference_hosts = (                    # List of reference hosts to determine
network
                    "foo.bar.edu",      # status, the exact number is not important.
                    "bar.foo.com",      # These hosts should be known to be reliable
                    "www.foobar.com",
                    "www.barfoo.com",
                    "www.foofoo.org"
                    );

The $SENDMAIL variable is probably ok. $PATH_TO_PLUTO contains the full directory path to the pluto program. $PLUTO_GURU contains the e-mail address of PLUTO's local "master" so that PLUTO can report errors and problems. Finally, a list of reliable web hosts is stored in @reference_hosts. These hosts are queried if there appears to be a problem with the monitored host to determine if the problem might be on PLUTO's end. There are a few additional variables that you may want to change; most of these can also be overridden from the command line as explained in the usage document.

Next, you will have to specify which hosts and files you want to monitor and how to report problems. This is done via a configuration file, default name conf. The configuration file consists of lines with key/value pairs separated by a colon, comment lines (beginning with a #), and empty lines which separate entries. The permissible keys are:

HOST: name of the host to monitor
FILE: name of the file to monitor (relative to serve r root, default /)
LOG: name of the log file to write test results to (default logs/server_up.log)
PORT: server port (default: 80)
NOTIFY: e-mail to notify immediately in case of server errors (default "none")
REPORT: e-mail to send monthly reports to (default $PLUTO_GURU)
URL: URL to monitor

At least HOST or URL must be specified. An example conf file is included in the distribution

Finally, see if everything works with the command: pluto -s -f -