rackmonkey faq

know your racks

General

Is RackMonkey really free?
Yes. RackMonkey is licenced under the GNU Public Licence. You may use it for commercial and non-commercial purposes without payment and the full source code is available.

Please can you add <foo> to RackMonkey?
We welcome feature requests, but take a look at the roadmap first to see what's forthcoming.

How do I get support for RackMonkey?
You can submit support requests via SourceForge. You should also join the RackMonkey announce list. Further support options are being considered at present.

Which languages is RackMonkey available in?
RackMonkey is currently available in English only.

How can I help with RackMonkey Development?

Features

Can I produce a report summarising all the stuff in my racks?
Yes you can. The report view allows you to see how much total rack space you're using, biggest customers and types of hardware.

Does RackMonkey support devices of sizes less than a whole rack unit?
At present RackMonkey is limited to devices and positions within racks being an integral number of rack units (U). A future release will support 1.5U devices. More general support for 1/3 and 1/2U devices may be added if there is sufficient demand.

Does RackMonkey support blades and blade chassis?
The current production release of RackMonkey (1.2.5) does not explicitly support blades, you need to use racks to emulate a blade chassis. Blade support is planned for RackMonkey 1.3.

Does RackMonkey produce high-quality prints?
RackMonkey 1.2.5 has dedicated CSS to produce high-quality prints. Print from your browser as normal and the print style sheet will be chosen automatically.

Does RackMonkey export to Microsoft Excel?
RackMonkey 1.2.5 includes Excel spreadsheet export functionality. The format is Excel 97-2004 and is readable by many applications including Microsoft Excel for Windows and Mac, OpenOffice Calc and iWork Numbers.

Can RackMonkey record power information?
Not in the current production release, but this is planned for RackMonkey 1.3.

Can RackMonkey record network information?
To a limited extent in 1.2.5. Greater support is planned for RackMonkey 1.3.

Does RackMonkey support authentication/authorisation?
Yes, using web server authentication (.htaccess). However, there is no fine-grained authorisation control: all logged in users (apart from the guest account) can read and update all records. A log is kept of all updates and who performed them; more information on this can be found in the documentation included in RackMonkey. Later release are likely to have more fine-grained authorisation.

Can RackMonkey pages be bookmarked?
Yes. URLs can be freely cut and pasted and the back button works.

Source Code

How is RackMonkey source code managed?
Using a Subversion (svn) repository on Sourceforge.net.

How do I check out the current trunk?
To check out the current trunk release of the main RackMonkey application use:

svn co https://rackmonkey.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rackmonkey/rackmonkey/trunk

Can I browse the RackMonkey svn repository via the web?
Yes. Browse RackMonkey Repository

How is your Subversion repository laid out?
The RackMonkey svn repository lives at https://rackmonkey.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot

The reason for the second rackmonkey directory is that we wanted to allow for other RackMonkey related projects: for example a command line interface.

Which programming language is RackMonkey written in?
Perl.

Does RackMonkey work with Perl 5.10?
RackMonkey has not been tested with Perl 5.10, but we have no reason to expect any problems. Development of RackMonkey will move to perl 5.10 in autumn 2009 (hello snow kitteh), while continuing to support 5.8.

How do I contribute bug fixes or changes?
Please open a support request with the details of the change and attach the relevant code.

Server/Database

Which operating systems can I use as a server?
Any modern Unix or Unix-like operating system should work including FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, NetBSD and Solaris.

Can I use Windows to run the RackMonkey server?
While it should be possible to get RackMonkey running on Windows, e.g. by installing Cygwin, we haven't tested and cannot provide support for such a configuration at present. Windows is fully supported as a client OS (see supported browsers: below).

Which databases does RackMonkey support?
RackMonkey gives you a choice of three open-source database engines. The Minimum Supported Version shown below is the oldest release of the database engine that RackMonkey has been tested with. It may work on older releases, but the developers reserve the right not to fix bugs when using RackMonkey with unsupported database releases. The data for RackMonkey 1.3 is provisional: this release is at an early stage.

Database SQLite Postgres MySQL*
RackMonkey 1.2 3.3.6 7.4.19** 5.0.22
RackMonkey 1.3 3.3.6 8.0.3 5.0.22

*MySQL is supported from RackMonkey 1.2.5. **Postgres 8 or higher strongly recommended.

Does RackMonkey support migrating data between different database engines?
Not automatically. If you wish to move between SQLite, Postgres or MySQL you need to manually manage the data export/import.

Are there any plans to support other database engines?
There are no plans to add support for other database engines at present.

Client/Browser

Which browsers does RackMonkey support?
The following table illustrates which browsers are officially supported by RackMonkey. Officially supported browsers are tested against; other modern browsers will likely work too.

Browser Firefox 2 Firefox 3 IE6 IE7 IE8 Safari 2 Safari 3Safari 4
RackMonkey 1.2 Yes 1.2.4+ Yes 1.2.3+ 1.2.5+ Yes 1.2.4+1.2.5+
RackMonkey 1.3 No Yes No No Yes No No Yes


Support for the following browsers is planned for future releases:

Does RackMonkey work with text browser like Lynx?
RackMonkey can be used for simple tasks via text browsers, however it hasn't been designed to support them. A text-based client (RackShell) is being designed to allow access to RackMonkey from a terminal or shell window.