cacti for Debian ---------------- originally written by Thorsten Sauter Fri, 3 Sep 2004 11:25:28 +0200 edited by sean finney Fri, 06 Jan 2006 08:07:46 +0100 edited by Paul Gevers Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:13:57 +0200 ---------------- * plugin architecture Since release 0.8.8 Cacti supports the plugin architecture out of the box. To use it, first read README.Plugins * Debian is one of the distribution that tries to get php5-suhosin installed by default if you are running php5. However due to bug 668157 this does not work well with cacti. If you have and want php5-suhosin installed, you should set a proper memory.limit in /etc/php5/cli/php.ini. We suggest 128M. See also bug 566609. http://bugs.debian.org/668157 http://bugs.debian.org/566609 * viewing graphs causing zombie mysql processes? If this happens, take a look at the solutions given in http://bugs.debian.org/344519. * ERROR: Garbage ':33:09 To 2005/10/27 08:33:09\c' after command: If you get this, it's probably because you just upgraded rrdtool, which changed its output format between versions and cacti is still trying to parse it using the old versions' output. If you go into your cacti settings, you will see an option to change the version of rrdtool you have installed, which should solve your problem. * installation note that cacti now uses automatic configuration via dbconfig-common. however, if you've chosen to go the manual route, the following information may be helpful. using the username and password you provided in debconf (and stored in the cacti config file /etc/cacti/debian.php), create a database and load up the cacti skeleton. assuming you chose a database and user both named 'cacti': mysql -u root -p -e "create database cacti" mysql -u root -p -e "grant all privileges on cacti.* to cacti@localhost identified by 'yourpasswordhere'; flush privileges" cat /usr/share/doc/cacti/cacti.sql | mysql -u cacti -p cacti next, go to http://$yourhost/cacti/, and follow the on-screen directions. the default login is admin/admin. once automagical configuration is brought back into cacti, this will probably change to something better. * Upgrading from recent versions of cacti (>= 0.8.x) There is a special directory install/ available, which contains some basic php scripts to upgrade your current database to the new version of cacti. Normally, this should happen automatically. If not, simply point your browser to your cacti installation: http://$yourhost/cacti/install At some point the automatic upgrade feature will return, but not now. * Custom local scripts if you've written your own scripts for monitoring various things in cacti, i strongly recommend that you not place them under /usr/share, as package maintainers like myself will sometimes wrongly assume that we have total control over the filespace there. instead, you should consider using an alternate location, such as somewhere under /usr/local/share/cacti, which should be already created for you when you install this package. * Cacti doesn't gather any data??? here's a collection of tips observations that might help if you can't figure out why cacti isn't gathering any data (assuming you're using the standard poller and not spine). cacti's poller is a pure php script located at /usr/share/cacti/site/poller.php because it's normally a rather noisy script, the stderr is redirected to an error logfile in /var/log/cacti/poller-error.log it's also possible something may be in /var/log/cacti/cacti.log cacti depends on a couple different php libraries/modules, which can be satisfied by packages from either php4 or php5 (to which i will ambiguously refer as phpN). thus, it's possible that some of the installed php packages come from one version of phpN and others from the other. if cacti isn't gathering any data, take a look to see if this is the case, and then install the missing modules for one of the versions of phpN and ensure that cacti is configured to exclusively use that version. also, it's possible that the phpN-mysql library isn't configured for the cmdline phpN program. check the contents of /etc/phpN/cli/php.ini for the lines: extension=snmp.so extension=mysql.so it's also been reported that phpN-cli requires safe mode to be turned off. if you get errors like: sh: line 1: /php: No such file or directory sh: line 1: /rrdtool: No such file or directory then try disabling safe mode for your phpN-cli in /etc/phpN/cli/php.ini. (See bug http://bugs.debian.org/364897) * Default initial username/password is admin/admin. probably not the most secure, so please change it as soon as you're done reading this sentence. did it? good, thanks :) at some point i'll make this part of the installation process, but in the meantime at least we have this note.