RackMonkey Installation

About RackMonkey

RackMonkey is an Open Source Rack & Asset Management web based application. Asset Management is a must for any System Administrator and this application certainly makes life easier. Especially working with multiple Racks across multiple locations this software means you know exactly in which rack your server and also how much space you have left. Visit there website to find out more:

http://flux.org.uk/projects/rackmonkey/

Preparing Ubuntu

For this guide I will use SQLite as the database and apache2 as the web server. So first install apache:
$ apt-get install apache2
We will configure apache later for the basic authentication. Now SQLite needs to be installed along with the libraries RackMonkey requires:

$ apt-get install sqlite3
$ apt-get install libdbi-perl
$ apt-get install libdbd-sqlite3-perl
$ apt-get install libhtml-template-perl
$ apt-get install libhtml-parser-perl

Downloading and Installing RackMonkey

Now lets download RackMonkey the following command is using a direct link got from the SourceForge download. To get the link follow the link below:

RackMonkey Download

Now click on Download Now and when asked where you want to save the file to click cancel, now use the direct link to download RackMonkey to your server:

$ wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/rackmonkey/rackmonkey/1.2.5/rackmonkey-1.2.5-1.tar.gz?use_mirror=netcologne&34531087

Now Extract the download tar file

$ tar -xvf rackmonkey-1.2.5-1.tar.gz

Now in the folder you extracted the files to there should be a folder named: “rackmonkey-1.2.5-1″. cd to this folder:

$ cd rackmonkey-1.2.5-1

We need to create a directory for the website to be held in. Because we havent edited any of the apache settings the default folder is /var/www. So lets create a folder here:

$ mkdir /var/www/rackmonkey

We have the folder to contain the web files for RackMonkey so now copy the files and set up the permissions:

$ cp rackmonkey-1.2.5/perl/rackmonkey.pl /var/www/rackmonkey
$ cp -r rackmonkey-1.2.5/perl/RackMonkey /var/www/rackmonkey
$ chmod 755 /var/www/rackmonkey/rackmonkey.pl
$ cp -r rackmonkey-1.2.5/www/* /var/www/rackmonkey

Lets copy the template and data content and edit permissions:

$ mkdir /var/lib/rackmonkey
$ chown www-data:www-data /var/lib/rackmonkey
$ cp -r rackmonkey-1.2.5/tmpl /var/lib/rackmonkey

Ok so now the website files have been copied. Next we need to set up the apache server. Great news the guys at rack monkey have kindly given an apache config file so simply copy the config files and then reload apache:

$ cp rackmonkey-1.2.5/conf/httpd-rackmonkey.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d 
$ /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

Apache is now configured but now we need to configure RackMonkey. So copy the RackMonkey configuration files:

$ cp rackmonkey-1.2.5/conf/rackmonkey.conf-default /etc/rackmonkey.conf</em></div>

The Configuration file now needs to be ammended with database information

dbconnect = dbi:SQLite:dbname=/var/lib/rackmonkey/rackmonkey.db tmplpath = /var/lib/rackmonkey/tmpl
wwwpath = /rackmonkey

RackMonkey is nearly up and running only thing that needs to be created now is the database. We now use SQLite to set up the schema for RackMonkey and then change the ownership of the database to the Web Server:

$ sqlite3 /var/lib/rackmonkey/rackmonkey.db < rackmonkey-1.2.5/sql/schema/schema.sqlite.sql 
$ sqlite3 /var/lib/rackmonkey/rackmonkey.db < rackmonkey-1.2.5/sql/data/default_data.sql 
$ sqlite3 /var/lib/rackmonkey/rackmonkey.db < rackmonkey-1.2.5/sql/data/sample_data.sql 
$ chown www-data:www-data /var/lib/rackmonkey/rackmonkey.db