This guide explains how to  install MRTG on Windows and monitor different signals like memory and network usage.

MRTG is a software used to monitor different “signals” and display them in nice graphs.

I will use Windows XP as Operating System but it also works on Windows Server 2003.

Download MRTG

I will install mrtg-2.16.2 which can be downloaded here, however you should install the latest version which can be found here.

After downloading it, unpack it to where you want, I will use the following path: C:\mrtg-2.16.2

Install Perl

To run MRTG we need to install Perl first, I would recommend installing ActivePerl which can be found here.

It is pretty simple to install Perl so I won’t cover it, just follow the Setup.

Setting up the SNMP Service

Browse to Control Panel – Add or Remove Programs – Add / Remove Windows Components and then select Management and Monitoring Tools and then click Next.

You will probably be requested to insert the Windows CD to copy the required files.

After installing it, we need to configure it.

Browse to Control Panel – Administrative Tools – Services and then find the Service called SNMP Service, double-click on it and then select the Traps tab.

In the Community name textbox, write public and then click the button Add to list.

Now switch to the Security tab.

Add public to the Accepted community names with the READ ONLY community right.

Then select Accept SNMP packets from these hosts and add 127.0.0.1 to the list.

We have successfully configured SNMP on our Windows machine.

Install MRTG

Now we need access to a Command Prompt. Click Start – Run and then insert cmd and press enter.

In my case I have extracted the MRTG files to the following path: C:\mrtg-2.16.2

cd C:\mrtg-2.16.2\bin

Now we are going to create our MRTG configuration file, the WorkDir is the Path to where you want the files to be written, for example the public folder of your webserver.

perl cfgmaker public@127.0.0.1 –global “WorkDir: c:\xampp\htdocs\mrtg” –output mrtg.cfg

If it doesn’t output anything, then it means it worked.

perl indexmaker –output index.html mrtg.cfg

This will create an html file with the layout. Now copy that index.html file into your WorkDir (in my case c:\xampp\htdocs\mrtg)

copy index.html c:\xampp\htdocs\mrtg

Don’t forget to replace c:\xampp\htdocs\mrtg with your WorkDir!

Run MRTG

We still need a command-prompt. Execute the following commands

cd C:\mrtg-2.16.2\bin

perl mrtg mrtg.cfg

You have now manually triggered mrtg to get the data and draw it into the graphs.

Now we need to make this run automatically as it would be quite annoying if you had to manually run this command every 5 minutes..

Open your mrtg.cfg with a texteditor and add the line RunAsDaemon: yes

Now execute perl mrtg mrtg.cfg once again, MRTG has been started as a daemon, this is quite annoying because the command-prompt has to stay open. You can also create a Windows Service (Click here for additional informations)

Add Memory Usage and other Data sources

First we need to configure the inbuilt Performance Log of Windows. Click on Control Panel – Admistrative Tools – Performance – Performance Logs and Alerts then select Counter Logs, then right-click on the blank window and select New Log Settings.

Now we are going to create a new log, insert a name you want to use and then click OK.

A Counter is only one log, like the memory usage and an object is a collection of informations on memory for example.

Click the button Add Counters or Add Objects.

I am going to add a Counter for this example.

Select Use local Computer counters then select Memory in the Performance Object list then select Avaible MBytes and click Add then Close.

Then select the Log Files tab.

Select Text File(Comma delimited) in the Log file type listbox and then click OK.

Our .csv file is located at C:\PerfLogs\

We are now going to configure a .cfg file in MRTG to parse the .csv file which is created by the Windows Log Tool.

Please note that this script is a little bit buggy and the final results needs some tweaking, such as setting the MaxByte value in the graphs etc. The script has been written by castellan.net

Download the script here. If the link is broken download the mkcfg.vbs script here and the getlog.pl script here (Don’t forget to name the script getlog.pl)

We need a command-prompt.  Execute the following commands:

cd C:\mrtg-2.16.2\bin

cscript mkcfg.vbs c:\perflogs\memory.csv memory

This should create 2 files, .html and .cfg.

This is a little bit tricky, the mkcfg.vbs script is a little bit bugy, it repeats the last diagram a couple of times, so open up the memory.cfg with a text-editor and locate the duplicate diagrams. (Should be easy to spot)

After you deleted them, you need to change the WorkDir.

Copy the created .html file into your public mrtg folder and then execute this

perl mrtg memory.cfg

You have created a new graph display for your .csv file! (Don’t forget to update this .cfg file too, refer to Run MRTG for more help)

If the legend isn’t big enough, change MaxBytes in the .cfg file.

You can also include memory.cfg into mrtg.cfg . Add the following line into mrt.cfg

Include: memory.cfg

Indexmaker

Doesn’t it annoy you that you have to visit 2 links to admire your graphs? Indexmaker can bind them together into one page.

perl indexmaker –output index.html mrtg.cfg memory.cfg

This command will bind both mrtg.cfg and memory.cfg into one file, named index.html. Now copy the index.html file into your WorkDir. That’s it. If you want to see detailed informations about a graph, click on it.

Finally

You might want to rename your legends and titles to make the graphs more readable.

I hope this quick guide was somewhat useful, if you have any questions, feel free to post a comment.

Thanks for reading and good luck.

Hi guys, I will also soon be posting pictures & schematics of my small Dot LED Matrix project which I am doing at school.

We had some Profilab classes at school and the exercices were too easy.. so I thought of other funny things to do. The Teacher agreed on helping me. Stay tuned

So, we have been working on this, and we have failed because the clock isn’t synchronized, we generate it with hardware and input it into the computer, which epic fails.

Going to check out for more solutions…

Happy 2009. I wish you health and whatever you may want

By the way, the people from gpl-violations have not responded to my email about the E-Tech router that is violating the GNU-GPL license.

I have bought a wrt54gl and installed openwrt on it, it is very interesting. Can’t wait to spend more time playing with it.

Hello everyone, I’ve been working on my router for 2 days now.

PCB

I have had it for some time now and I knew it ran busybox, but I didn’t have a telnet login and the Webpage didn’t have any Injection exploits..so a few days ago I wanted to see if there was a new firmware for my router, and I downloaded a *new* package, I just took the wrong .rar, which ended up being a good thing…

There was an Executable in there and so I tried it, it logged in into the router with telnet, and gave me back from juicy informations like the Hardware Revision. I proceeded in sniffing the program logging into the router, and so I had my login.

I spent some time trying out things..and I ended up looking for some support on google, where I did not find anything. So I decided to rip the router open and analyze it.

That’s where I am currently, finding out stuff about the hardware. I can tell that it runs AR7, a Texas Instrument Chip (Mips) and probably got a 2mb rom. (Not too sure about that).
Well, I’m entering the informations I can find here: http://wiki.openwrt.org/Hardware/E-Tech

It’s a very rewarding experience since I love playing with hardware but never have the *needed* hardware

Btw, Busybox and the linux kernel are licensed under GPL..I wonder why I can’t find the source :/

This is totally not Linux right?

# cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.4.17_mvl21-malta-mips_fp_le (root@localhost.localdomain) (gcc version 2.95.3 20010315 (release/MontaVista)) #1 Tue Jun 13 14:17:31 CST 2006

Hello everyone, I have had my good ol’ k750i for quite some time now and my joystick stopped working..

Most people would throw it away and buy another phone but I am not like that… I wouldn’t throw something away that cost around 300€ just because one lousy little plastic piece that cost 0,10cents stopped working.

So I began to think how I could fix it and came to the conclusion that I could try to “blow” into it and use some lubricant. However, do do that, I needed to open my phone so I started googling for some kind of tutorial and found this good page

It tells you how to disassemble most of the current Sony Ericsson phones. Don’t forget that you may void your warranty when opening your phone.

After opening the phone, I proceeded in disassembling the electronics until I separated the electronics from the cover.

You could clean the dust that might be inside the joystick with a compressor.
After blowing some dust away(even if it’s with your mouth) you can insert the lubricant into the joystick.

You can use wd-40 or any other Spray that works like wd-40.
This is one method to insert the lubricant into the joystick.

Another method to insert the lubricant into the joystick would be to spray it around the black plastic stick and then make sure it enters trough the small gaps around it.

After putting lubricant into the joystick move it around, top-bottom-left-right and that a few times, then let it rest and put some more into it.
Then wait a bit before turning the phone on again or it could create a short-circuit and damage your phone.
(You could throw it away after that)

That’s how I fixed mine. Good luck

Picture from here

Hello, I just got an old IBM NetVista workstation to play with
The computer has 256mb ram and a Pentium 3 processor.

I wanted to install openBSD on it, but I couldn’t get the computer to boot from the CD, so I had to look around for a solution, the Boot Agent has two modes, normal user mode and admin mode.

In the user mode you can only change the order, like Try network first, then local drives.
But you cannot set the CD boot as highest priority.

That’s why you have to get into the admin mode, to enter that mode, you need to press F1 while the computer boots, and then you can change the boot order.

As I have been thinking of buying a Soekris or any other embedded computer to create a firewall I’ll try to get it running on this workstation first to see if I really need it. (And also if I’m able to get it running).

I might also try to get a (secure) server running.

Well, see you around

We all have heard about the Remote File Inclusions, LFI, sql injections and all the other nasty variations of php “hacking”.
This mainly happens because people code pages without being aware of the security of their product.

In this tutorial I will explain how to sanitize a GET variable.
This programming design is used to build pages without using iframes or frames and to optimize the homepage for search engines.
An url usually looks like www.domain.com/index.php?p=about .

include $_GET['page'];

Let’s take this piece of code for example, a normal url would look like www.domain.com/index.php?page=about.php. Now, an attacker could exploit this by simply changing the about.php into some shellcode like c99 or r57.
He would include an evil piece of code that is often used to deface homepages.
The solution to this problem would be to check if the file exists, and if it doesn’t, then it should include an error page.

We can use a function in PHP called file_exists.

file_exists($file);

It basically checks if the file exists in the current folder or not.

$file = $_GET['page'].'.php';
if (file_exists($file)) {
   include $file;
}else{
   echo 'Error';
}

This would already do the job.
You could also filter the forward slashes (/) and the double-dots(..) and delete them from $file.

The only problem is that the evil user can access all your files trough the ?page=”page here”.
We can define which pages we want to allow with an array. This is a quite simple task to do with PHP, god bless those useful functions, I mainly code in Pascal (at school) and pascal has very few really useful functions…
We define an array with all the pages we want to allow and then use the function in_array.
We could also check if there are symbols such as / and .. inside the requested page and delete them.
This is the syntax for the str_replace function.

str_replace ("Text to find","Replace by",$_GET["page"]);

The check would look like this

  $allowed = array('page1','page2','page3');
  $selection = str_replace ('..','',$_GET['page']);
  $selection = str_replace ('/','',$_GET['page']);
  if(in_array($selection,$allowed) && file_exists($selection)){
    include $selection;
  }
  }else{
    echo 'error, unauthorized page';
  }

Hello, If you’ve been trying to create an Installer but it fails at 100% with the error seek failed on an unnamed file then your setup is too big.
You cannot create a file bigger than 2gb because of the filesystem on windows, FAT32 does not handle such big files..

Hi everyone, quick post about the NeonCube patcher.
If you get the error filename.rar is not a valid RAR archive then you forgot a slash in your neoncube.ini. Probably in your patch_folder.
It should look like this : /folder/for/patches/
The last forward slash is very important.

Hi, I’ve been running XAMPP and having a weird error, here’s the solution.
If you get an error like the following one when using XAMPP and WinMySQLAdmin and want to get rid of it, open the program, go to the .ini tab, and remove the password=Remove_this_part.
You can also remove the program from the Startup folder.

ThisAccess violation at address 10002593 in Module ‘LIBMYSQL.dll’. Read of address 00000000.

Btw, the use of this program is deprecated, use phpmyadmin which also comes with XAMPP.

Source from ApacheFriends Forum