Cacti

Cacti Installation

This document assumes you are using Red Hat Linux or Centos.

Cacti requires that the following software is installed on your system.

• RRDTool 1.0.49 or 1.2.x or greater
• MySQL 4.1.x or 5.x or greater
• PHP 4.3.6 or greater, 5.x greater highly recommended for advanced features
• A Web Server e.g. Apache

Please make sure, the following packages are installed according to your operating systems requirements. Verify, that httpd and mysqld are started at system startup.

• httpd
• php
• php-mysql
• php-snmp
• php-ldap (when using LDAP authentication)
• php-xml
• mysql
• mysql-server
• net-snmp

You should not need to do any configuration for Apache/PHP as the defaults provided by the RPM's are good enough. You will however need to setup a virtual host in apache to point at your cacti installation once installed.

Configure MySQL

Set a password for the MySQL root user

shell> mysqladmin --user=root password somepassword
shell> mysqladmin --user=root --password reload

Install and Configure Cacti

1. Extract the distribution tarball. Untar to the DOCUMENT_ROOT of your web server

shell> tar xzvf cacti-version.tar.gz

2. Create the MySQL database:

shell> mysqladmin --user=root create cacti

3. Import the default cacti database:

shell> mysql cacti < cacti.sql

4. Optional: Create a MySQL username and password for Cacti.

shell> mysql --user=root mysql
mysql> GRANT ALL ON cacti.* TO cactiuser@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'somepassword';
mysql> flush privileges;

5. Edit “include/config.php” and specify the database type, name, host, user and password for your Cacti configuration.

$database_type = "mysql";
$database_default = "cacti";
$database_hostname = "localhost";
$database_username = "cactiuser";
$database_password = "cacti";

6. Set the appropriate permissions on cacti's directories for graph/log generation. You should execute these commands from inside cacti's directory to change the permissions.

shell> chown -R cactiuser rra/ log/

(Enter a valid username for cactiuser, this user will also be used in the next step for data gathering.)
7. Add a line to your ”/etc/crontab” file similar to1):

*/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.
8. Make sure, that the cron daemon is running:

shell> service crond start
shell> chkconfig crond on

9. Point your web browser to: http://your-server/cacti in the with a username/password of admin. You will be required to change this password immediately. Make sure to fill in all of the path variables carefully and correctly on the following screen.