All the Unix examples are used in the environment I support together with my colleagues. The intent is to visualize numbers you easily (? on Unix ?) could get out of the operating system. But: it is much easier to see a picture instead of getting tons of numbers! So we decided to graph some numbers we often need.

We use ONE server as central station to monitor the other (approx. 100) servers, using HP's IT/O. This server is allowed to run remote commands on the other servers via .rhosts file in all the root's home directories. This central server also runs an Apache server. The Apache user is the second user which is allowed to run root commands remotely on the other servers (for security reasons, this user is NOT named httpd!).

Based on this, I developed the way Ploticus is working:

• ploticus is only installed on the central station,
• it's started via Web-Interfaces to create graphics "on-the-fly"/on demand or
• some graphics are created on a regular base using a cron job out of the central server.

For security reasons, we do not use samba to exchange the graphs ... but this is also an option to create all graphics on one central place on one Unix server.

Feel free to contact me if you have more questions about the setup in general! Use either  this form or open your eMail directly to write to  Andreas Schmidt.

All examples are open for improvement, of course, and need to be adopted for your needs.

Please let me know if you have other examples you're willing to share: please use either this  form or use directly your eMail program:  mailto:andreas@hillschmidt.de