Windows Install Docs.. out of date?

[jdmatl]

==PHP install == Taken from the Cacti Win install Docs===
Extract PHP to c:\ and rename the new directory to 'php'.
Copy the files in c:\php\dlls to c:\winnt\system32
Copy the file c:\php\php4ts.dll to c:\winnt\system32
Move all MIB files from c:\php\mibs to c:\usr\mibs
Create the directory c:\tmp
In the c:\php directory, rename the php.ini-dist file to php.ini, copy it to c:\winnt, and make the following changes to the file:
=======

Is this documentation totally out-of-date? From what I can tell the above is totally wrong with php 4.3.6

I have installed to Win2003 w/IIS6 and can find none of these directories. I used the .exe install version of Php 4.3.6.

The php.ini file is automatically put into the Windows directory

The part about changes to the php.ini file appear to be incorrect with php 4.3.6. no need to
";Windows Extensions
;Note that MySQL and ODBC support is now built in, so no dll is needed for it."

I get the following error when opening my "local" host in cacti gui


Warning: exec(): Unable to fork [<DEFAULT> -O vt -c "public" -v 2c -t 1 127.0.0.1:161 .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.1.0] in C:\cacti\lib\snmp.php on line 66
SNMP error

what am I missing?

thanks

[dieter]

you are missing perl I think. But try deleting the pre-entered data sources for localhost because this is linux stuff...

[jdmatl]

you are missing perl I think. But try deleting the pre-entered data sources for localhost because this is linux stuff...

Thanks, I have perl installed. The Windows docs don't mention to install Perl, but it is needed. By default, the "localhost" in Cacti gets linux templates applied to it. Changed those to Windows based. That error is what is a result of using Windows based templates for cacti's "localhost".

[raX]

You do bring up a good point that should be addressed. Since the Unix and Windows versions of Cacti are already kept separate, there is no reason why I couldn't ship a different 'cacti.sql' file with each one. The only problem is that the default Windows monitoring in Cacti relies on SNMP, while the default Linux/Unix monitoring is able to use local scripts. I would hate to add a bunch of SNMP data sources to a default installation because it makes a number of assumptions about the state of the machine. It would be nice if we had some script that could be run reliably on a Windows machine that would gather some basic statistics. I think Perl and WMI have been combined in the past to provide some pretty sweet statistics. I will look into bundling something along these lines with the Windows version of Cacti.

-Ian

[Lux]

I think you would be better off simply not having any default devices or datasources in the installation. If I understand correctly, the only real difference at the moment between the Linux and Windows versions of Cacti is the inclusion of Cactid in the Linux distribution.

Maintaining two different databases/distributions would be added work that is relatively unproductive. If you simply leave out the default datasources, you would save a lot of trouble for yourself and for new windows users of cacti. (if you don't know a thing about unix, which is the majority of people, than error messages refering to "cat" are rather confusing)

At the same time, it wouldn't hurt to add a local windows host to the default templates for both unix and windows installations. The user is should be able to determine what system they are running on.

Mike

[raX]

You are correct in that the two distributions of Cacti are almost identical. There are a few minor "tweaks" here and there, but nothing substantial.

I agree that removing all default data sources would make less work for the Windows users, but it would make more for the Unix users at the same time. Reasonably speaking, you are correct in that it is counter-productive to make the default data work on every platform. However there is something to be said about setting up a new installation of Cacti and being able to get some graphs out of the box without any knowledge of Cacti. Creating cross-platform scripts might be viable if I were to use PHP and create scripts that would work under multiple environments.

A local Windows host template is definitely overdue. The SNMP-based one is nice, but doesn't always work *out of the box*.

-Ian