Debian based Telemetry Box Distribution released

January 25th, 2001

Version 1.0 of the Telemetry Box Distribution has finally been released. The Tbox distribution is a Debian GNU/Linux 'potato' based custom Linux version for remote monitoring and maintenance of networks.

A telemetry box allows remote management and diagnostics. It uses a customized version of netsaint to gather data. Netsaint has been enhanced so that the configuration is possible via the Tbox Webinterface through SQL structures. Netsaint logs into a SQL table. Tools on the Tbox can then display the data in a variety of ways (graphs or reports).

Some of the functionality of the Tbox:

Installation from CD Image

It is highly advisable to install from a CD image. The CD image fits on a Credit Card sized CD (only 50 MB) and contains all functionality. I will have these CDs physically available at the LWE in Europe at the beginning of February.

The telemetry software can be installed as an add on to existing Debian installations but it requires modifications to apache and/or PHP. See http://telemetrybox.org/ for details.

Open source contributions

Sources are available from http://telemetrybox.org/tbox/source/. Patches to existing software have been or will be contributed to the respective open source projects.

openrock.net has been outfitted with a kernel based http server (with patches implementing range and virtual hosting). Downloading should be no problem.

Note that we do not consider this version to be of production quality. Some features are only working under certain conditions. Some components have a prototype character. There are various issues that are being improved on. Help would be appreciated. Ideally we would like to have everything part of standard Debian. The biggest problem was the ease of installation and handling which required some changes to packages which might not be welcome.

siteROCK, the specialists for 24x7 monitoring, made this release possible.

This article was submitted by Christoph Lameter <christoph@lameter.com>.