counters.pl version 1.05
========================

Counters.pl collects the CLI counters from network devices and produces custom
reports. The reports can be viewed via a web site and/or sent via email.
There is a flexible configuration language in which reports can be specified.
The format and style of the html reports are controlled by Template Toolkit
templates and css.

Why would you want to collect CLI counters? The CLI counters can be reset 
indepently of the SNMP counters and when collected weekly can highlight issues
such as connection errors that you will not see looking at graphs produced
from SNMP counters. I run counters.pl early every Friday morning and review
the results before lunch on that day.

Currently only Cisco network equipment is supported.

This program uses the clogin looking glass distributed with RANCID to login
to network equipment.

Version 1.05 introduced directory "prettification". This can be switched on
by enabling creation of directory headers, footer and htaccess files in
counters.pl or by using the cgi script index.cgi.


NOTES

Don't use '>' or '#' in your prompt or in your banner or other motd. clogin
these to find the end of the command line prompt and will get confused
otherwise.

If upgrading from 1.02 you will have to update your html report template.

The example templates and CSS have been updated in version 1.05.

The current version can only be run at most once per day for a given report.

INSTALLATION

1. Install RANCID (if you haven't already, http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/).
2. Copy counters.pl to an appropriate binary directory and make it executable.
3. Select an account to run counters.pl and make sure it can use clogin
   to connect to the network equipment. You will probably need to create a
   .cloginrc file in the home directory.
4. Create a web directory if using web reports and copy the css file
   template.css to .template.css in it.
5. Create a configuration directory for counters.pl and copy the template
   files into it.
6. Create one or more configuration files using the examples provided. The
   file named config is a sanitised version of the one I use.
7. If you use Tacacs+ Allow the account that runs counters.pl to invoke the 
   commands in your configuration.
7. Test run counters.pl from the command line.
8. Add it to cron, weekly or whatever.
9. If you want fancy indexes check the man page of 'index.cgi' for its 
   installation instructions, or use the htaccess file generation capabilities
   of counters.pl itself.


DEPENDENCIES

Counters.pl runs on UNIX/Linux.

This program requires the following to be installed:

    RANCID

It also requires the following perl modules:

    Sort::Naturally
    Template
    MIME::Lite


COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2009,2011,2012 by Peter Yardley

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.8 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.