cacti for Debian 

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originally written by Thorsten Sauter <tsauter@gmx.net>
Fri,  3 Sep 2004 11:25:28 +0200

edited by sean finney <seanius@debian.org> 
Fri, 06 Jan 2006 08:07:46 +0100

edited by Paul Gevers <paul@climbing.nl>
Wed, 01 Aug 2012 22:13:57 +0200
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* 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.
