[ixpmanager] sflow daemon

[Rowan Thorpe]

On Thu, 07 Nov 2013 09:53:31 +0000 Nick Hilliard <nick at inex.ie> wrote:
> On 07/11/2013 07:16, Rowan Thorpe wrote:
> > > Is sflowtool supposed to be daemonized, or is there a script that
> > > kicks it off?  It feels like I am missing a piece.
> > 
> > Daemon. It seems there might be two areas for improvement in the
> > documentation(?):
> 
> sflowtool is started as a pipe by the sflow-to-rrd-handler script, and
> sflow-to-rrd-handler is daemonised.

...which reminds me (and I can't remember if I already mentioned it)
but when I was first wrangling IXP-M installs I made a self-contained,
fully autoconf/automaked "ixmp-sflow-to-rrd" bundle which meant I was
able to do this:

$ tar xzf [bundle].tar.gz
$ cd [bundle]
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt [--with-sflowtool]
$ make
$ sudo make install

...and be done with it. Some of the logic from that (minus all the
autotool-m4-voodoo) found its way into the IXPM-autoinstaller I
uploaded later.

I added the --with-sflowtool autoconf option which downloads,
configures, builds and installs sflowtool for those poor unfortunates
whose packaging systems don't yet have sflowtool... I've got it sitting
under git locally. Let me know if you want it uploaded...

> In fact, INEX runs multiple sflowtool instances.  We send all our
> sflow data to a centralised collector, and it uses sflowtool with
> different command line arguments to fan the sflow data out from there
> to several other systems.  These other systems use "sflowtool -l" to
> pipe the data to various daemons.  One of these systems handles the
> p2p stuff.

For those wanting to do likewise, in that debian-package-in-waiting I
included an "sflowtool-forwarder" system init-script which sets up a
"fanout" instance like Nick describes (with configurable ports via
"defaults" file), which can be easily copied. It is platform agnostic
enough, being sysv init.

> > FWIW: a month or two ago I posted an ITP (intent to package) and I
> > ..[snip]..
> > http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=724939
> 
> Yep, I saw that,

:-)

> but have no contact with the debian people.

:-(

>  I also submitted a couple of sflowtool patches, which made it into sflowtool
> 3.30 (would recommend using this version for IXP manager, as it
> behaves much better with sflow-to-rrd-handler).

:-) Thanks for the heads-up about the version-bump Nick. I will add
Debian packaging for that version too, so there can be three versions
for them to ignore [sigh].

-- 
Rowan Thorpe
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