Rackmonkey FAQ
General
Is Rackmonkey really free?
Yes. Rackmonkey is licensed under the GNU Public License.
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?
I am no longer actively developing Rackmonkey. See the Rackmonkey homepage for details.
How do I get support for Rackmonkey?
You can submit support requests via SourceForge.
You should also join the Rackmonkey
announce list.
Which languages is Rackmonkey available in?
Rackmonkey is currently available in English only.
How can I help with Rackmonkey Development?
I am no longer actively developing Rackmonkey. See the Rackmonkey homepage for details.
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?
Rackmonkey is limited to devices and positions within racks being an integral number of rack units (U).
Does Rackmonkey support blades and blade chassis?
Rackmonkey does not explicitly support blades, you need to use racks to emulate a blade chassis.
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?
This hasn't been implemented.
Can Rackmonkey record network information?
To a limited extent, but it doesn't support VLANs and cabling etc.
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.
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
- rackmonkey
- rackmonkey
- trunk
- branches
- tags
- rackmonkey
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.
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, I 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 (development isn't currently occurring on this release).
| 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 3 | Safari 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 |
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.