cacti for Debian * Default initial username/password The default username is admin. The initial password for the admin user in Debian for Cacti is taken from the connection string for the MySQL database as found in /etc/cacti/debian.php in the line containing $database_password. Of course you are fully free to change the password of course (via the cacti interface). * Manual installation Note that cacti uses automatic configuration via dbconfig-common. However, if you've chosen to go the manual route, the following information may be helpful. Using the username and password you provided in debconf (and stored in the cacti config file /etc/cacti/debian.php), create a database and load up the cacti skeleton. Assuming you chose a database and user both named 'cacti' and your database is on localhost: mysql -u root -p -e "create database cacti" mysql -u root -p -e "create user 'cacti'@'localhost';" mysql -u root -p -e "alter user 'cacti'@'localhost' identified by 'yourpasswordhere';" mysql -u root -p -e "grant all privileges on cacti.* to 'cacti'@'localhost';" mysql -u root -p -e "flush privileges;" cat /usr/share/doc/cacti/cacti.sql | mysql -u cacti -p cacti Next, go to http://$yourhost/cacti/, and follow the on-screen directions. The default login/password is admin/admin. * Custom local scripts If you've written your own scripts for monitoring various things in cacti, it is strongly recommended that you not place them under /usr/share, as package maintainers 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 It's also been reported that php-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 php-cli in /etc/php/*/cli/php.ini. (See bug http://bugs.debian.org/364897) * Time zone names Cacti takes the names of time zones from the mysql.time_zone_name table. Because this table is a global table, which on Debian is empty by default, I don't want to manipulate it during install of cacti. If you want cacti to benefit from time zone names, than you should run the following command manually. $ mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | sudo mysql mysql -- Paul Gevers , Sat, 10 Jun 2017 20:45:50 +0200