Cacti is one of the best and complete network graphing solution, quite fast and had multiple data aquisition and also multiple user management features all in a single box. I’ve been packaging this utility for klixs since 2007 and here is how to achieve a complete and free of harnesses installement on any KLIXs system :
Install apache, mysql, php and phpMyAdmin if you don’t have them and check the availability of their services before continuing, and also please make sure it has already listed on rc.d as default services to run during boot.
Install the cacti and cacti-id from Synaptic or using apt-get but I prefer Synaptic since it needs some bunch of dependencies library.
Once cacti were installed well, now create the cacti database with user privilege and dump the prequisite default database.
For simplicity, use phpMyAdmin to create the database name cacti and import the default sql database structure and table templates from /usr/share/cacti name cacti.sql
If done, now edit the /etc/cacti.conf and adjust the dbname, dbuser and dbpasswd to match the one you create, and save.
All cacti php source and scripts should be placed at /var/www/cacti and cacti mod conf to httpd service were already done automatically by rpm installation process, so you have to do nothing, and only trigger the installation process by opening your favourite browser and access : http://localhost/cacti/install and follow the installer to the end. There are nothing to worry about the installation process because all php modules already taken care off by rpm installation before. You should see the login page after installation and login using default user admin and default password admin, then it asked the new admin password.
Now to make sure cacti user could place the graph files and log, create rra and log directory under /var/www/cacti, and give them cactiuser privileges so it could create the rrd log within them.
chown -Rf <cactiuser.cactiuser> rra/ log/
Add a line to your /etc/crontab file similar to:
*/5 * * * * cactiuser php /var/www/html/cacti/poller.php > /dev/null 2>&1
Replace cactiuser with the valid user specified in the previous step.
Replace /var/www/html/cacti/ with your full Cacti path.
Done. Now you have a full working cacti network monitoring tools on KLIXs.
It’s time to populate with server and host data, and here is screen caps :
